The system had, however, already begun to decay. The rise of the towns by the growth of trade gradually created new centres of independence and new classes who broke the bonds of innate status. The intrusion of the moneyed city classes and the Indian “Nabobs” into the rural districts tended to destroy the feudal idea. The growth of new sects in religion made fresh points of individual resistance, degenerating often into spiritual anarchy or unsocial quietism. The spread of learning built up a small but active disintegrating force of those who had detected the shams around them. But the real Perseus who was to free the people from their political bondage was Newcomen or Watt, Hargreaves or Crompton, Kay or Arkwright, whichever may be considered to have contributed the main stroke towards the Industrial Revolution of the last century.[20] From the inventions of these men came the machine industry with its innumerable secondary results--the Factory System and the upspringing of the Northern and Midland industrial towns,[21] and the evangelization of the waste places of the earth by the sale of grey shirtings. Throughout one-third of England the manor gave way to the mill or the mine; and the feudal lord had to slacken his hold of political and social power in order to give full play to the change which enriched him with boundless rents and mining royalties. And so it happened in England that the final collapse of mediævalism came, not by the Great Rebellion nor by the Whig Treason of 1688, nor yet by the rule of the Great Commoner, but by the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century, which created the England of to-day. Within a couple of generations the squire faded away before the mill-owner; and feudalism lingered thenceforth only in the rapidly diminishing rural districts, and in the empty remnants of ceremonial organization. The mediæval arrangement, in fact, could not survive the fall of the cottage industry; and it is, fundamentally, the use of new motors which has been for a generation destroying the individualist conception of property. The landlord and the capitalist are both finding that the steam-engine is a Frankenstein which they had better not have raised; for with it comes inevitably urban Democracy, the study of Political Economy, and Socialism. The event which brought to a head the influences making for political change was the French Revolution. The fall of the Bastille was hailed by all who had been touched by the new ideas. “How much the greatest event it is that ever happened in the world! and how much the best!” wrote Charles James Fox.[22] It shewed, or seemed to shew, to men that a genuine social reconstruction was not only desirable, but possible. The National Assembly, respectable old oligarchy as it was, pointed the way to legislative fields not even yet completely worked out.