To recapitulate: the sixteenth century Protestants proclaimed the supremacy of private judgment over corporate religious authority. Slowly but inevitably such doctrine, making religion not a corporate but a personal thing, has weakened the ties between man and man. Notice now, how from the resulting hedge between individuals and classes springs the evil forest of our discontents which darkens the Christian world to-day. In the countries where the great landlords and the mercantile classes, working under cover of the narrow enthusiasm of the fanatics, won their great sixteenth century triumph (that is in England, Holland and the Northern Germanies) that triumph resulted in the confiscation of Church property by the State and its prompt absorption, not by the mass of the people as in France after the Revolution, but by the aforesaid great landholders and merchants themselves. With the increased influence due to this addition to their wealth, they were able gradually to dispossess the yeoman farmers and, in trade and industry, to substitute unrestricted competition in place of the guild system; but the strain which would otherwise have been promptly felt in the Protestant societies was relieved, as we have seen, by the great age of expansion. When the new discoveries of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries brought about in England the industrial revolution, that revolution took place in a society in which the mass of the people had _already_ forgotten their old economic freedom. _Already_ they were accustomed to see their economic life dominated by merchants and landlords (over whom they had no check) acknowledging no definite moral authority whatsoever. In the two hundred years since the process had begun, it had come to seem natural that a few should control the means of production, and that these few, the rich, should look upon poor men mainly as instruments for their own further private enrichment. It was because of the destructive sixteenth century moral change and in no way because of any quality inherent in the new machines that the discovery of these last has made so enormously for unhappiness and strife. It is true that the machines have enormously accelerated the long process which has already reduced the wage-earner from the Christian liberty his ancestors enjoyed to something very like serfdom. But the essential point to be grasped is that the machines have _only_ accelerated the process, they did not bring it about and they have not changed its nature.