It must be noted that modern Industrialism has spread to many other centres from England. It bears everywhere the features stamped upon it by its origin in this country. Section Five The Capitalist State in Proportion as It Grows Perfect Grows Unstable From the historical digression which I have introduced by way of illustrating my subject in the last two sections I now return to the general discussion of my thesis and to the logical process by which it may be established. * * * * * The Capitalist State is unstable, and indeed more properly a transitory phase lying between two permanent and stable states of society. In order to appreciate why this is so, let us recall the definition of the Capitalist State:-- "A society in which the ownership of the means of production is confined to a body of free citizens, not large enough to make up properly a general character of that society, while the rest are dispossessed of the means of production, and are therefore proletarian, we call _Capitalist_." Note the several points of such a state of affairs. You have private ownership; but it is not private ownership distributed in many hands and thus familiar as an institution to society as a whole. Again, you have the great majority dispossessed but at the same time citizens, that is, men politically free to act, though economically impotent; again, though it is but an inference from our definition, it is a necessary inference that there will be under Capitalism a conscious, direct, and planned _exploitation_ of the majority, the free citizens who do not own by the minority who are owners. For wealth must be produced: the whole of that community must live: and the possessors can make such terms with the non-possessors as shall make it certain that a portion of what the non-possessors have produced shall go to the possessors. A society thus constituted cannot endure. It cannot endure because it is subject to two very severe strains: strains which increase in severity in proportion as that society becomes more thoroughly Capitalist. The first of these strains arises from the divergence between the moral theories upon which the State reposes and the social facts which those moral theories attempt to govern. The second strain arises from the insecurity to which Capitalism condemns the great mass of society, and the general character of anxiety and peril which it imposes upon all citizens, but in particular upon the majority, which consists, under Capitalism, of dispossessed free men. Of these two strains it is impossible to say which is the gravest. Either would be enough to destroy a social arrangement in which it was long present. The two combined make that destruction certain; and there is no longer any doubt that Capitalist society must transform itself into some other and more stable arrangement. It is the object of these pages to discover what that stable arrangement will probably be. * * * * *