suddenly the circling has ceased, and we find ourselves breaking
away. Correlated with the sudden development of mechanical forces that
first began to be socially perceptible in the middle eighteenth century,
has been the appearance of great masses of population, having quite
novel functions and relations in the social body, and together with this
appearance such a suppression, curtailment, and modification of the
older classes, as to point to an entire disintegration of that system.
The _facies_ of the social fabric has changed, and--as I hope to make
clear--is still changing in a direction from which, without a total
destruction and rebirth of that fabric, there can never be any return.

The most striking of the new classes to emerge is certainly the
shareholding class, the owners of a sort of property new in the world's
history.

Before the eighteenth century the only property of serious importance
consisted of land and buildings. These were "real" estate. Beyond these
things were live-stock, serfs, and the furnishings of real estate, the
surface aspect of real estate, so to speak, personal property, ships,
weapons, and the Semitic invention of money. All such property had to be
actually "held" and administered by the owner, he was immediately in
connection with it and responsible for it. He could leave it only
precariously to a steward and manager, and to convey the revenue of it
to him at a distance was a difficult and costly proceeding. To prevent a
constant social disturbance by lapsing and dividing property, and in the
absence of any organized agency to receive lapsed property, inheritance
and preferably primogeniture were of such manifest advantage that the
old social organization always tended in the direction of these
institutions. Such usury as was practised relied entirely on the land
and the anticipated agricultural produce of the land.

But the usury and the sleeping partnerships of the Joint Stock Company
system which took shape in the eighteenth and the earlier half of the
nineteenth century opened quite unprecedented uses for money, and
created a practically new sort of property and a new proprietor class.
The peculiar novelty of this property is easily defined. Given a
sufficient sentiment of public honesty, share property is property that
can be owned at any distance and that yields its revenue without thought
or care on the part of its proprietor; it is, indeed, absolutely
irresponsible property,