mers who could afford to
pay for them in cash.

During the early middle ages, when land had been almost the only form of
wealth, the nobility were the only people who were considered wealthy.
But as I have told you in a previous chapter, the gold and silver which
they possessed was quite insignificant and they used the old system
of barter, exchanging cows for horses and eggs for honey. During the
crusades, the burghers of the cities had been able to gather riches
from the reviving trade between the east and the west, and they had been
serious rivals of the lords and the knights.

The French revolution had entirely destroyed the wealth of the nobility
and had enormously increased that of the middle class or "bourgeoisie."
The years of unrest which followed the Great Revolution had offered
many middle-class people a chance to get more than their share of this
world's goods. The estates of the church had been confiscated by
the French Convention and had been sold at auction. There had been
a terrific amount of graft. Land speculators had stolen thousands of
square miles of valuable land, and during the Napoleonic wars, they had
used their capital to "profiteer" in grain and gun-powder, and now they
possessed more wealth than they needed for the actual expenses of their
households, and they could afford to build themselves factories and to
hire men and women to work the machines.

This caused a very abrupt change in the lives of hundreds of thousands
of people. Within a few years, many cities doubled the number of their
inhabitants and the old civic centre which had been the real "home" of
the citizens was surrounded with ugly and cheaply built suburbs where
the workmen slept after their eleven or twelve hours, or thirteen hours,
spent in the factories and from where they returned to the factory as
soon as the whistle blew.

Far and wide through the countryside there was talk of the fabulous sums
of money that could be made in the towns. The peasant boy, accustomed
to a life in the open, went to the city. He rapidly lost his old health
amidst the smoke and dust and dirt of those early and badly ventilated
workshops, and the end, very often, was death in the poor-house or in
the hospital.

Of course the change from the farm to the factory on the part of so
many people was not accomplished without a certain amount of opposition.
Since one engine could do as much work as a hundred men, the ninety-nine
others who were th