d, only thus made
merchandise of their labour after they had been deprived of their own
means of production, and of all the guarantees of existence furnished
under the old feudalism. And the history of this, their expropriation,
is written in history in characters of blood and fire.

The industrial capitalists, the new potentates, had to displace not only
the guild-masters of handicrafts, but also the feudal lords, who were in
possession of the sources of wealth. But though the conquerors thus
triumphed, they have risen by means as opprobrious as those by which,
long before, the Roman freedman overcame his _patronus_. The servitude
of the labourer was the starting point of the development which involved
the rise of the labourer and the genesis of the capitalist. The form of
this servitude was changed by the transformation of feudal exploitation
into capitalist exploitation.

The inauguration of the capitalist era dates from the sixteenth century.
The process consisted in the tearing of masses of men from their means
of subsistence, to be hurled as free proletarians on the labour market.
The basis of the whole process is the expropriation of the peasant from
the soil. The history of this expropriation, differing in various
countries, has the classic form only in England.

The prelude of the revolution which founded the capitalist mode of
production was played at the beginning of the sixteenth century by the
breaking up of the bands of feudal retainers, who, as Sir James Steuart
well says, "everywhere uselessly filled house and castle." The old
nobility had been devoured by the great feudal wars; the new was a child
of its time, for which money was the power of all powers. Transformation
of arable land into sheepwalks was therefore its cry, and an
expropriation of small peasants was initiated which threatened the ruin
of the country. Thornton declares that the English working-class was
precipitated without any transition from its golden into its iron age.

To the evictions a direct impulse had been given by the rapid increase
of the Flemish wool manufacturers and the corresponding rise in the
price of wool in England. At length such a deterioration ensued in the
condition of the common people that Queen Elizabeth, on a journey
through the land, exclaimed, "_Pauper ubique jacet_," and in the
forty-third year of her reign the nation was constrained to acknowledge
the terrible pauperism that had arisen by the introduction