This means that the other nations could not rival England in extending the market for an increasing productiveness. It betokens a remarkable infrequence of disturbance through financial crises and market stagnation. From this come important consequences for the working man: a generally favourable condition of the labour market, constantly growing need of labour, less lack of work, on the one side; on the other, satisfaction of the employer, and his inclination and ability to remunerate better the workman, to give him some share in the golden stream of profit. Besides this peculiar combination of circumstances of an economic nature, which can never again come to any land because the competing and strengthened nations now struggle for supremacy in the markets of the world, consider the most remarkable condition of political party life in England. It is well known that this rests, at least since the beginning of this century, upon an alternation of power between the two great parties, the Tories and the Whigs. They both strive after control, and they reach this from time to time by shrewd concession, to the spirit of progress, by a happy use of the situation at the moment. Now one, now the other, quickly seizes and masters it. The _tertius gaudens_ in this struggle for mastery is the working men as a class. It does not require much penetration to see that, for example, the radical English legislation in favour of the working man has come to pass only through the spite of the Tories, agrarian in their interests, against the liberal manufacturers. But if you wish to suppose noble motives for parliamentary majorities, the resolution of the Tories to provide protection for the industrial proletariat must at least have been made easy through the consideration that the land proletariat would never get such laws. Later, especially since extension of the franchise, the policy of the Whigs was directed to reaching rule, or to sustaining themselves therein, with the help of the working man. That involved, naturally, concessions and a spirit of friendliness to the working class, even if hard to yield, even if the employers had not personal interest in these concessions. But the employers--thanks again to the happy combination of circumstances at that time in England--had without doubt to some degree a direct and personal interest, if not in advancing, at least in not opposing, the exertions of the working class for an improvement of their situation within the limits of the existing economic order.