The diminished and impoverished Crown could no longer stand. It fought against the new wealth, the struggle of the Civil Wars; it was utterly defeated; and when a final settlement was arrived at in 1660, you have all the realities of power in the hands of a small powerful class of wealthy men, the King still surrounded by the forms and traditions of his old power, but in practice a salaried puppet. And in that economic world which underlies all political appearances, the great dominating note was that a few wealthy families had got hold of the bulk of the means of production in England, while the same families exercised all local administrative power and were moreover the Judges, the Higher Education, the Church, and the generals. They quite overshadowed what was left of central government in this country. Take, as a starting-point for what followed, the date 1700. By that time more than half of the English were dispossessed of capital and of land. Not one man in two, even if you reckon the very small owners, inhabited a house of which he was the secure possessor, or tilled land from which he could not be turned off. Such a proportion may seem to us to-day a wonderfully free arrangement, and certainly if nearly one-half of our population were possessed of the means of production, we should be in a very different situation from that in which we find ourselves. But the point to seize is that, though the bad business was very far from completion in or about the year 1700, yet by that date England had already become /Capitalist/. She had already permitted a vast section of her population to become _proletarian_, and it is this and _not_ the so-called "Industrial Revolution," a later thing, which accounts for the terrible social condition in which we find ourselves to-day. How true this is what I still have to say in this section will prove. In an England thus already cursed with a very large proletariat class, and in an England already directed by a dominating Capitalist class, possessing the means of production, there came a great industrial development. Had that industrial development come upon a people economically free, it would have taken a co-operative form. Coming as it did upon a people which had already largely lost its economic freedom, it took at its very origin a _Capitalist_ form, and this form it has retained, expanded, and perfected throughout two hundred years. It was in England that the Industrial System arose. It was in England that all its traditions and habits were formed; and because the England in which it arose was already a Capitalist England, modern Industrialism, wherever you see it at work to-day, having spread from England, has proceeded upon the Capitalist model.