f Darwinians and Biblical critics, that has led to the
decay of religious belief in the urban working class. At the same
time, industrialism has revived religious belief among the rich. In
the eighteenth century French aristocrats mostly became free-thinkers;
now their descendants are mostly Catholics, because it has become
necessary for all the forces of reaction to unite against the
revolutionary proletariat. Take, again, the emancipation of women.
Plato, Mary Wolstonecraft, and John Stuart Mill produced admirable
arguments, but influenced only a few impotent idealists. The war came,
leading to the employment of women in industry on a large scale, and
instantly the arguments in favour of votes for women were seen to be
irresistible. More than that, traditional sexual morality collapsed,
because its whole basis was the economic dependence of women upon
their fathers and husbands. Changes in such a matter as sexual
morality bring with them profound alterations in the thoughts and
feelings of ordinary men and women; they modify law, literature, art,
and all kinds of institutions that seem remote from economics.

Such facts as these justify Marxians in speaking, as they do, of
"bourgeois ideology," meaning that kind of morality which has been
imposed upon the world by the possessors of capital. Contentment with
one's lot may be taken as typical of the virtues preached by the rich
to the poor. They honestly believe it is a virtue--at any rate they
did formerly. The more religious among the poor also believed it,
partly from the influence of authority, partly from an impulse to
submission, what MacDougall calls "negative self-feeling," which is
commoner than some people think. Similarly men preached the virtue of
female chastity, and women usually accepted their teaching; both
really believed the doctrine, but its persistence was only possible
through the economic power of men. This led erring women to punishment
here on earth, which made further punishment hereafter seem probable.
When the economic penalty ceased, the conviction of sinfulness
gradually decayed. In such changes we see the collapse of "bourgeois
ideology."

But in spite of the fundamental importance of economic facts in
determining the politics and beliefs of an age or nation, I do not
think that non-economic factors can be neglected without risks of
errors which may be fatal in practice.

The most obvious non-economic factor, and the one the neglect of w