protective duties to foster and strengthen their growing industries.

Even Lord Chatham, who saw as plainly as Walpole the folly of Continental war, was dragged into a long support of Frederick the Great because the "natural enmity" against France forced us to support any enemy of that country. The conflict was in fact inevitable; for the French were as much bent upon the acquisition of mercantile and colonial supremacy as we were, though the present generation has almost forgotten that Canada and Louisiana were French settlements, that some of the finest islands in the West Indies, including San Domingo, were under the French flag, and that Dupleix was in his way a greater statesman than Clive. From the beginning of the seventeenth century, the history of the trade of the world is little more than a history of the development of the English-speaking peoples. At the back of the race hatred between the English and the d-d foreigner stands the hard interest of the trading class. The hypocritical contention that we conquered countries for their good has been reserved for our own sanctimonious moneygetters of to-day. Our fathers made no such pitiful pretence. They knew right well that they fought and conquered, intrigued and bribed, protected and undersold for personal advantage and private gain. And they succeeded in every direction, save where they came into collision with men of their own blood. Times of grievous depression and defeat were not unknown; but on the ocean our officers and seamen, our explorers and common sailors, literally organised victory in the long run. So wealthy and powerful was our Empire, that we could even afford to lose the noblest group of colonies the world ever saw.

At the latter half of the eighteenth century therefore,

and just prior to the revolt of the American colonies, the position of Great Britain was far more powerful, relatively to other nations, than it was at the death of Elizabeth. A period covered by three lives of only moderate length carries us back from the England of Chatham, Burke, and Junius, of Dr Johnson, Sheridan, and Arthur Young, to the days of Bacon and Shakspere. Wealth, luxury, and refinement had increased to a marked degree, and the power of man over nature had greatly extended; but England and Wales had but 6,500,000 inhabitants, and the people were still in the main an agricultural community. Nor had their condition much improved. Arthur Young's record shows that the agricultural labourer of England offered no such contrast to the ground-down peasant of France, as his ancestor had presented a few generations before.

The machinery of commerce was being rapidly perfected, and the complete separation of the people from the soil, the concentration of the means of production, capital and credit in the hands of the "upper" classes, had greatly advanced. Already efforts were being made by the capitalists to release themselves from those State restrictions which interfered with "freedom of contract" between the pauper and the plutocrat. Men who got fortunes by trade were gradually buying out the old landed proprietors, and systematically clearing the estates and enclosing commons. In short, the time had arrived for another advance in the great historical development in the power of capital and the influence of land monopoly with pure competition rent as its commercial result. Landed estate was now being rated at its capitalised value estimated by the amount of interest represented by its rental. An estate of so much a year in land was figured to the mercantile man as a capital value of a pro

portional sum. Though landowners dominated Parliament, their economical position was of course very different from that of their feudal predecessors. The nobles and squires of the eighteenth century, though still to a great extent tied to their own property and neighbourhood, were really divorced from any duty towards the labourers, and had become sleeping partners in the profits of the farmer. The manufacturers, bankers, merchants, &c., exercised a pressure from without on the legislature similar in kind, though greater in degree than the working-classes exert upon our capitalist House of Commons now.

The artisans were in a period of transition like the rest. The old system was falling into ruins; the new class antagonism was but slightly felt. Already, however, the introduction of machinery cast its shadow before, and one thinker at least saw very early in the day what a complete social revolution its uncontrolled operation might bring about in the condition of the people. Sir James Steuart, writing in 1767, ten years before the publication of Adam Smith's work, says: "Neither can a machine which abridges the labour of man be introduced all at once into an extensive manufacture without throwing many people into idleif a number of machines are all at once introduced into the manufacture of an industrious nation (in consequence of that freedom which must necessarily be indulged to all sorts of improvement, and without which a State cannot thrive), it becomes the business of a statesman to interest himself so far in the consequences as to provide a remedy for the inconveniences resulting from the sudden alteration."

ness

But the power of the individual capitalist over the *See Rodbertus-Jagetzoff in Appendix.

whole process of production and exchange had got too far by this time for any heed to be paid to such wise counsels. Each for himself had become almost the only guiding principle of the community. Everything led relentlessly up to the formation of a destitute proletariat in the country as well as in the great cities, entirely at the disposal of the possessing class. "Why do large undertakings in the manufacturing way ruin private industry," asks the writer last quoted, "but by coming nearer to the simplicity of slaves?" The simplicity of slaves indeed! Such is the lot provided for the mass of the English people from the end of the last century. The remainder of this work will trace the record of its development. From the yeoman and lifeholder to the vagrant and farmer's hind; from the vagrant and farmer's hind to the agricultural labourer and artisan; from the artisan and agricultural labourer to the slave to the machine. Here is the sad evolution. The nobility and gentry who now owned the State and controlled the political business were as anxious for the extension of commerce as the trading class. Still, up to the latter half of the eighteenth century, England differed from other countries only in having larger commercial interests, in proportion to her population, than any other European nation. The great economical revolution that was all the time preparing had not yet become manifest. France, Germany, Italy, might, to all appearance, have as well taken the lead in the new processes of production as ourselves. That they did not was due to causes geographical, geological, social, and economical, which can now be clearly seen.

G

CHAPTER IV.

LABOUR AND SURPLUS VALUE.

IN the last three chapters I have briefly passed through the economical and social transition from the England of the feudal times, when men were for the most part in command of their means of production which they handled for the purpose of obtaining articles of immediate use, only the superfluity being brought forward for exchange, they themselves also being bound to one another to their feudal superiors and to the Church by personal and not by mere pecuniary relations from this period, which in the main represented rude wealth and prosperity for the people, the development of a race of landless families has been traced contemporaneously with a growth of large landowners, considerable farmers and capitalists, and an artisan and agricultural-labourer class, but few of whom could become masters of a business, or who could hope to obtain, either as owner or tenant, any large extent of land. During the whole of this 250 or 300 years, the condition of the mass of the people had been becoming more and more dependent upon the good pleasure of the classes above them. Exchange, which in the earlier period had been a secondary consideration for production, now gradually became the paramount object; the means of production also, as well as the control of individual exchange, instead of being very widely distributed, had become concentrated to a large