Here then in England we may begin 122 to see what the extinction of feudality was to end in, for the time at least. Mediaeval England is gone, the manners and ways of thought of the people are utterly changed; they are called English, but they are another people from that which dwelt in England in the fifteenth century when “forestalling and regrating” were misdemeanours; when the guild ruled over the production of goods, and division of labour was not yet; when both in art and literature the people had their share,—nay, when what of both there was, was produced by the people themselves. Gone also is militant Puritanism, buried deep under mountains of cool formality. England is bourgeois and successful throughout its whole life; without aspirations, for its self-satisfaction is too complete for any, yet gathering force for development of a new kind, —as it were a nation taking breath for a new spring.
For under its prosperous self-satisfaction lies the birth of a great change—a revolution in industry—and England is at the time we are writing of simply 123 preparing herself for that change. Her prosperity and solid bureaucratic constitutional government—nay, even the commonplace conditions of life in the country, are enabling her to turn all her attention towards this change, and towards the development of the natural resources in which she is so rich.
The fall of the feudal system, the invasion of the individualist method of producing goods, and of simple exchange of commodities, were bound to lead to the final development of the epoch—the rise of the great machine industries—and now the time for that development is at hand. The growing world-market is demanding more than the transitional methods of production can supply.
In matters political prejudice is giving way to necessity, and all obstacles are being rapidly cleared away before the advent of a new epoch for labour; an epoch of which we may say that if no great change were at hand for it in its turn, it would have been the greatest disaster that has ever happened to the race of man.