Albert Brisbane prefaces this wonderful prophecy by these remarks: "In 1805 or 6, amid the preoccupation of war and military politics, he [Fourier] foresaw and described with accuracy the future formation of vast joint-stock companies destined to monopolize and control all branches of industry, commerce and finance, and establish what he called 'An industrial or commercial feudalism'--a feudalism that would control society by the power of capital, as did the old baronial or military feudalism by the power of the sword, and as despotically. Under the dominion of the great barons who leagued together to control the social world there was a monopoly of the then existing wealth, namely, the land and the laboring classes. Now, society having passed out of the military _regime_, and entered the industrial and commercial, it is threatened with another vast system of monopoly." He concludes as follows: "This was written seventy years ago [it is now almost ninety years] when public attention was absorbed in military conquests and glory. To-day advanced thinkers on social questions are beginning to see the conquest of the industrial and commercial worlds by the power of associated capital. To-day the new feudalism has more than half entangled society in its meshes, and its complete establishment stares us in the face. What perspicuity to have foreseen so clearly what is now being realized! If prescience is a test of science--if the foretelling of future events is a test of the laws that govern them and from which they are deducible, then Fourier must have discovered at least some of the laws which govern social evolution.