selves before the sentence could be carried out. Ten others were condemned to prison and exile; and so ended the first Socialist propaganda.

It is commonly said that Napoleon crushed the Revolution, but what he really did was to put on it the final seal of law and order. The Revolution was set on foot by the middle classes in their own interests; the sentence that Napoleon accepted as the expression of his aims, "la carrière ouverte aux talens"

-"the career thrown open to talent”— is the motto of middle-class supremacy. It implies the overthrow of aristocratic privilege and the setting up in its place of a money aristocracy, founded on the privilege of exploitation, amidst a world of so-called "free competition." The middle-class, the first beginnings of which we saw formed in mediaval times, after a long and violent struggle, has conquered and is supreme from henceforth.

CHAPTER XIII

THE INDUSTRIAL

REVOLUTION IN ENGLAND

There

IN the last chapter, wherein the condition of England was dealt with, we left it a prosperous country, in the ordinary sense of the word, under the rule of an orderly constitutionalism. was no need here for the violent destruction of aristocratic privilege; it was of itself melting into money-privilege; and all was getting ready for the completest and securest system of the plunder of labour which the world has yet seen.

England was comparatively free in the bourgeois sense; there were far fewer checks than in France to interfere with the exaction of the tribute which labour has to pay to property to be allowed

to live. In a word, on the one hand, exploitation was veiled; and on the other, the owners of property had no longer any duties to perform in return for the above-said tribute. Nevertheless, all this had to go on on a small scale for a while.

Population had not increased largely since the beginning of the seventeenth century; agriculture was flourishing; one-thirtieth of the grain raised was exported from England; the working classes were not hard pressed, and could not yet be bought and sold in masses. There were no large manufacturing towns, and no need for them; the presence of the material to be worked up, rather than the means for working it mechanically-fuel, to wit-gave a manufacturing character to this or that country-side. It was, for example, the sheep-pastures of the Yorkshire hill-sides, and not the existence of coal beneath them, which made the neighbourhood of the northern Bradford a weaving country. Its namesake on the Wiltshire Avon was in those days at least as important a centre of the clothing industry. The broadcloth of the Gloucestershire valleys,

Devonshire and Hampshire kersies, Witney blankets and Chipping Norton tweeds, meant sweet grass and long wool, with a little water-power, and not coal, to turn the fulling-mills, to which material to be worked up was to be brought from the four quarters of the globe.

The apparent condition of labour in those days seems almost idyllic, compared with what it now is; but it must be remembered that then as now the worker was in the hands of the monopolist of land and raw material; nor was it likely that the latter should have held his special privilege for two hundred years without applying some system whereby to develop and increase it.

Between the period of the decay of the craft-guilds and this latter half of the eighteenth century there had grown up a system of labour which could not have been applied to the medieval workmen ; for they worked for themselves and not for a master or exploiter, and thus were masters of their material, their tools and their time. This system is that of the Division of Labour; under it the unit of labour is not an individual man,

M

but a group, every member of which is helpless by himself, but trained by constant practice to the repetition of a small part of the work, acquires great precision and speed in its performance. In short,

each man is not so much a machine as a

part of a machine. For example, it takes five men to make a glass bottle: it is the group of these five men that makes the bottle, not any one of them. It is clear that under this system the individual workman is entirely at the mercy of his master the capitalist in his capacity of superintender of labour: in order not to be crushed by him, he must combine to oppose his own interests to those of his employer.

It was by this method, then, that the demands of the growing world-market were supplied down to the end of the eighteenth century. The great political economist, Adam Smith, whose book was first published in 1771, marks the beginning of the transition between this system and that of the great machine industries; but his work implies throughout the Division of Labour system.