y now go in advance of the demand and try
to develop it. Production is no longer for the locality, no longer for
the well-known need of neighboring markets, but for the world-market.
Production goes on for remote regions and for a general market, for
all continents, for an actually unknown and not definitely calculated
need; and in order that the product may arouse need a weapon is
supplied it--cheapness. Cheapness is the weapon of a product, with
which, on the one hand, it obtains customers, and, on the other,
drives from the field other goods of the same nature, which are likewise
urged upon the consumers; so that under the system of free
competition any producer may hope, no matter what enormous quantities
he may produce, to find a market for them all if he only succeeds, by
making his goods exceedingly cheap, in keeping out of the market the
goods of his competitors. The predominant character of such a society
is vast and boundless wealth, but, on the other hand, a great
instability of all relations, an almost continual, anxious insecurity
in the position of each individual, together with a very unequal
sharing of the returns of production among those taking part in it.

Thus great had been the changes brought about, unnoticed in the heart
of society, by the revolutionary and all-pervading activity of
industrialism, even before the end of the eighteenth century.

Though the men of the Peasant Wars had not ventured any other
conception than that of founding the State upon land ownership, though
they had not, even in thought, been able to free themselves from the
view that land ownership is necessarily the element which holds
sovereignty over the State and that participation in that ownership is
the condition for participation in that sovereignty, yet the quiet,
imperceptible, revolutionary progress of industrialism had brought
about the condition that, long before the end of the eighteenth
century, land ownership had become an element stripped entirely of its
former importance, and had fallen to a subordinate position, in the
face of the development of new methods of production, of the wealth
which this development bore in its bosom and increased from day to
day, and of the influence which it clearly had on all the people and
their affairs--even upon the largely impoverished nobility.

The revolution was therefore an accomplished fact in the actual
relations of society long before it broke out in France; and it was