shook the politics of Europe to the
centre, and from Lisbon to Pekin divided the governments of the world.

There was a kingdom whose people had in an eminent degree attained to
freedom of industry and the security of person and property. Its middle
class rose to greatness. Out of that class sprung the noblest poets and
philosophers, whose words built up the intellect of its people; skilful
navigators, to find out for its merchants the many paths of the oceans;
discoverers in natural science, whose inventions guided its industry to
wealth, till it equalled any nation of the world in letters, and
excelled all in trade and commerce. But its government was become a
government of land, and not of men; every blade of grass was
represented, but only a small minority of the people. In the transition
from the feudal forms the heads of the social organization freed
themselves from the military services which were the conditions of
their tenure, and, throwing the burden on the industrial classes, kept
all the soil to themselves. Vast estates that had been managed by
monasteries as endowments for religion and charity were impropriated to
swell the wealth of courtiers and favorites; and the commons, where the
poor man once had his right of pasture, were taken away, and, under
forms of law, enclosed distributively within the domains of the
adjacent landholders. Although no law forbade any inhabitant from
purchasing land, the costliness of the transfer constituted a
prohibition; so that it was the rule of the country that the plough
should not be in the hands of its owner. The church was rested on a
contradiction; claiming to be an embodiment of absolute truth, it was a
creature of the statute-book.

The progress of time increased the terrible contrast between wealth and
poverty. In their years of strength the laboring people, cut off from
all share in governing the state, derived a scant support from the
severest toil, and had no hope for old age but in public charity or
death. A grasping ambition had dotted the world with military posts,
kept watch over our borders on the northeast, at the Bermudas, in the
West Indies, appropriated the gates of the Pacific, of the Southern and
of the Indian ocean, hovered on our northwest at Vancouver, held the
whole of the newest continent, and the entrances to the old
Mediterranean and Red Sea, and garrisoned forts all the way from Madras
to China. That aristocracy had gazed with terror on the