for a new dispensation.

What happened was interesting and significant. Coal and iron, and their
derivatives--steam and machinery--rapidly revealed their possibilities.
To take advantage of these, it was necessary that labour should be
available in large quantities and freely subject to exploitation; that
unlimited capital should be forthcoming; that adequate markets should be
discovered or created to absorb the surplus product, so enormously
greater than the normal demand; and finally, it was necessary that
directors and organizers and administrators should be ready at the call.
The conditions of the time made all these possible. The land-holding
peasantry of England--and it is here that the revolution was
accomplished--had been largely dispossessed and pauperized under Henry
VIII, Edward VI and Elizabeth, while the development of the wool-growing
industry had restricted the arable land to a point where it no longer
gave employment to the mass of field labourers. The first blast of
factory production threw out of work the whole body of cottage weavers,
smiths, craftsmen; and the result was a great mass of men, women, and
children without defense, void of all rights, and given the alternative
of submission to the dominance of the exploiters, or starvation.

Without capital the new industry could neither begin nor continue. The
exploits of the "joint-stock companies" invented and perfected in the
eighteenth century, showed how this capital could easily be obtained,
while the paralyzing and dismemberment of the Church during the
Reformation had resulted in the abrogation of the old ecclesiastical
inhibition against usury. The necessary capital was forthcoming, and the
foundations were laid for the great system of finance which was one of
the triumphant achievements of the last century.