agricultural land as formerly. The exports have fallen off; towns where a dozen years ago trade was flourishing and wages high, are now encumbered with a population which they cannot find employment for; and though from time to time there are rumours of improvement in trade, little comes of them, and people are obliged to await some stroke of magic that shall bring us 171 back our old prosperity “of leaps and bounds.” A new commercial revolution has been for some time supplementing the first one, and we are now in the epoch of the perfecting of the machines invented in the earlier years of the great industry. Its result is the condensation of cognate businesses and vastly improved organisation of production. This means the gradual extinction of the “merchant” or middleman between the manufacturer and the retail dealer, and lastly and especially an extremely rapid progress in the supplanting of hand industry by machinery; so that the time seems not far distant when handicraft will have entirely ceased to exist in the production of utilities.
The fact is that the commerce of the great industries has entered insensibly into its second stage, and sheer cut-throat competition between the different nations has taken the place of the benevolent commercial despotism of the only nation which was thoroughly prepared to take advantage of the first stages of Industrial Revolution—Great Britain, to wit.
This second stage is assuredly preparing 172 the final one, which will end with the death of the whole bourgeois commercial system. Meanwhile, what is the real social product of the Industrial Revolution? We answer the final triumph of the middle classes, materially, intellectually, and morally. As the result of the great political revolution in France was the abolition of aristocratic privilege, and the domination in the world of politics of the bourgeoisie, which hitherto had had little to do with it, so the English Industrial Revolution may be said to have created a new commercial middle class hitherto unknown to the world. This class on