Such was the mode of the development of capitalistic production in its first stage. In this stage a permanent wage-working class was formed, new markets were developed, many of them by colonial expansion and territorial conquest, and production for sale and profit became the rule, instead of the exception as formerly when men produced primarily for use and sold only their surplus products. A new form of class division thus arose out of this economic soil. Instead of being bound to the land as the serfs had been under feudalism, the wage-workers were bound to their tools. They were not bound to a single master, they were not branded on the cheek, but they were, nevertheless, dependent upon the industrial lords. Economic mastery gradually shifted from the land-owning class to the class of manufacturers. The political and social history of the Middle Ages is largely the record of the struggle for supremacy which was waged between these two classes. That struggle is the central fact of the Protestant Reformation and the Cromwellian Commonwealth. The second stage of capitalism begins with the birth of the machine age; the introduction of the great mechanical inventions of the latter half of the seventeenth century, and the resulting industrial revolution, the salient features of which we have already traced. That revolution centered in England, whose proud but, from all other points of view than the commercial, foolish boast for a full century it was to be "the workshop of the world." The new methods of production, and the development of trade with India, and the colonies and the United States of America, providing a vast and apparently almost unlimited market, a tremendous rivalry was created among the people of England, tauntingly, but with less originality than bitterness, designated "a nation of shopkeepers" by Napoleon the First. Competition flourished and commerce grew under its mighty urge. Quite naturally, therefore, competition came to be regarded as "the life of trade," and the one supreme law of progress by British economists and statesmen. The economic conditions of the time fostered a sturdy individualism on the one hand, expressing itself in a policy of _laissez faire_, which, paradoxically, they as surely destroyed. The result was the paradox of a nation of theoretic individualists becoming, through its poor laws, and more especially through the vast body of industrial legislation which developed in spite of theories of _laissez faire_, a nation of practical collectivists.