e most highly developed
peoples.

A corresponding change in the political structure followed this
powerful revolution in the economic conditions of society but by no
means immediately. The organisation of the State remained feudal in
form while society became more and more bourgeois. Trade, particularly
international, and to a greater degree world-commerce demanded for its
development the free and unrestricted possessors of commodities, who
have equality of right to exchange commodities at least in one and the
same place. The transition from hand labor to manufacture presupposes
the existence of a number of free laborers, free on the one hand from
the fetters of the gild and on the other free to employ their labor
force in their own behalf, who could make contracts for the hire of
their labor force to the manufacturers and therefore face him as if
endowed with equal rights as contracting parties. At last then there
arose equality of rights and actual equality of all human labor, for
labor force finds its unconscious but strongest expression in the law
of value of modern bourgeois economy according to which the value of a
commodity finds its measure in the socially necessary labor
incorporated in it. But where the economic circumstances render
freedom and equality of rights necessary, the political code, gild
restrictions and peculiar privileges oppose them at every step. Local
provisions of a legal character, differential taxation, exceptional
laws of every description, interfere not only with foreigners or
colonials but frequently enough also with whole categories of citizens
in the nation itself. Gild privileges in particular constituted a
continual impediment to the development of manufacture. The course was
nowhere open and the chances of the bourgeois victory were by no means
equal, but to make the course open was the first and ever more
pressing necessity.

As soon as the demand for the abolition of feudalism and for the
equality of rights was set on the order of the day it had necessarily
to take an ever widening scope. As soon as the claim was made in
behalf of commerce and industry it had also to be made in behalf of
the peasants who, being in every stage of slavery from serfdom labored
for the most part without any return for the feudal lords and were
obliged in addition to perform innumerable services for them and for
the State. Also it became desirable to abolish feudal privileges, the
immunity of the nob