goaded by starvation into
ineffectual {65} revolt. It is probable that in the nineteenth
century, thanks to the Revolution, France and England changed places,
and that in this respect not only Ireland but the British Dominions
resemble the former rather than the latter. The transformation can be
studied best of all in the United States, in parts of which the
population of peasant proprietors and small masters of the early
nineteenth century were replaced in three generations by a propertyless
proletariat and a capitalist plutocracy. The abolition of the economic
privileges of agrarian feudalism, which, under the name of equality,
was the driving force of the French Revolution, and which has taken
place, in one form or another, in all countries touched by its
influence, has been largely counter-balanced since 1800 by the growth
of the inequalities springing from Industrialism.

In England the general effect of recent economic development has been
to swell proprietary rights which entitle the owners to payment without
work, and to diminish those which can properly be described as
functional. The expansion of the former, and the process by which the
simpler forms of property have been merged in them, are movements the
significance of which it is hardly possible to over-estimate. There
is, of course, a considerable body of property which is still of the
older type. But though working landlords, and capitalists who manage
their own businesses, are still in the aggregate a numerous body, the
organization for which they stand is not that which is most
representative of the modern economic world. The general tendency for
the ownership and administration of {66} property to be separated, the
general refinement of property into a claim on goods produced by an
unknown worker, is as unmistakable as the growth of capitalist industry
and urban civilization themselves. Villages are turned into towns and
property in land changes from the holding worked by a farmer or the
estate administered by a landlord into "rents," which are advertised
and bought and sold like any other investment. Mines are opened and
the rights of the landowner are converted into a tribute for every ton
of coal which is brought to the surface. As joint-stock companies take
the place of the individual enterprise which was typical of the earlier
years of the factory system, organization passes from the employer who
both owns and manages his business, into