ed home to enter public life, and who was
converted from Toryism to Radicalism by a careful study of financial,
political, and industrial problems. A great number of reform laws can
be traced directly to his incredible activity during his thirty years
in Parliament. The third leader was John R. McCulloch, an orthodox
economist, a disciple of Adam Smith, for some years editor of The
Scotsman, which was then a violently radical journal cooperating with
the newly established Edinburgh Review in advocating sociological and
political reforms.

Thus Great Britain, the mother country from which Americans have
inherited so many institutions, laws, and traditions, passed in turn
through the periods of extreme paternalism, glorified competition, and
governmental antagonism to labor combinations, into what may be called
the age of conciliation. And today the Labour Party in the House of
Commons has shown itself strong enough to impose its programme upon the
Liberals and, through this radical coalition, has achieved a power for
the working man greater than even Francis Place or Thomas Carlyle ever
hoped for.

CHAPTER II. FORMATIVE YEARS

America did not become a cisatlantic Britain, as some of the colonial
adventurers had hoped. A wider destiny awaited her. Here were economic
conditions which upset all notions of the fixity of class distinctions.
Here was a continent of free land, luring the disaffected or
disappointed artisan and enabling him to achieve economic independence.
Hither streamed ceaselessly hordes of immigrants from Europe, constantly
shifting the social equilibrium. Here the demand for labor was constant,
except during the rare intervals of financial stagnation, and here the
door of opportunity swung wide to the energetic and able artisan. The
records of American industry are replete with names of prominent leaders
who began at the apprentice's bench.

The old class distinctions brought from the home country, however, had
survived for many years in the primeval forests of Virginia and Maryland
and even among the hills of New England. Indeed, until the Revolution
and for some time thereafter, a man's clothes were the badge of his
calling. The gentleman wore powdered queue and ruffled shirt; the
workman, coarse buckskin breeches, ponderous shoes with brass buckles,
and usually a leather apron, well greased to keep it pliable. Just
before the Revolution the lot of the common laborer was not an enviable
one. His