This was essentially Lamennais’ plea in 1831. A revolution, he told his fellow countrymen, is only the beginning of things. You have cleared the ground; upon that cleared ground, you have to raise the fabric of a living society. France did, indeed, already provide the instance of the danger of an uncompleted revolution. The political equality established by the Revolution of 1789, was intended to give a fair field to every man; but because it went no further, in effect it opened the door to the strong man. The strong man appeared presently in the person of Napoleon; and with Napoleon came the Empire and all that that episode cost Europe in blood and treasure. The same kind of miscarriage (in another region and on a larger scale) has befallen the wider historical development of the French Revolution. Because it was not seen that the “natural right” of property might no less than the “divine right” of noble birth become a source of disinheritance, the door was opened to a movement which in the nineteenth century produced a new type of privilege and a new manner of disinheritance. That Jack’s vote has been declared to be as good as his master’s has not saved Jack from an exploitation as real and burdensome as that under which his father groaned. But it is of a different kind. The older disability was chiefly agrarian; the new is industrial. The doctrine of political liberty (interpreted in the light of Adam Smith) received an economic translation in the doctrine of “laissez-faire”; and this combined, first, with the restrictions imposed upon the power of the territorial aristocracy, second, with the new commercial civilisation which began at the Industrial Revolution, and third, with the advantage with which the propertied classes, especially the rich merchant class, started in the new order, has brought about a new kind of disability. The common people have exchanged the old master for a new, a feudal aristocracy for an industrial plutocracy, land barons for trade barons; they have been released from agrarian serfdom only to be tied to the wheel of industrial wage-slavery. Political emancipation did not bring with it real freedom.