instincts of craftiness, parsimony, and almost savage self-interest.

As a class, it was very far from being what it was under the Roman
Empire; on the other hand, it was equally removed from what it was
during the Middle Ages in England, France and the Rhineland. Under
mediaevalism chattel slavery had disappeared, and the lot of the peasant
was a happier one than he had known before. He had achieved definite
status, and the line that separated him from the gentry was very thin
and constantly traversed, thanks to the accepted system of land tenure,
the guilds, chivalry, the schools and universities, the priesthood and
monasticism. The Renaissance had rapidly changed all this, however;
absolutism in government, dispossession of land, the abolition of the
guilds, and the collapse of the moral order and of the dominance of the
Church, were fast pushing the peasant back into the position he had held
under the Roman Empire, and from which Christianity had lifted him. By
1790 he had been for nearly three centuries under a progressive
oppression that had undone nearly all the beneficent work of the Middle
Ages and made the peasant class practically outlaw, while breaking down
its character, degrading its morals, increasing its ignorance, and
building up a sullen rage and an invincible hatred of all that stood
visible as law and order in the persons of the ruling class.

Filtering through the impoverished and diluted crust of a dissolving
aristocracy, came this irruption from below. In their own persons
certain of these people possessed the qualities and the will which were
imperative for the organization of the industry, the trade, and the
finance that were to control the world for four generations, and produce
that industrial civilization which is the basis and the energizing force
of modernism. Immediately, and with conspicuous ability, they took hold
of the problem, solved its difficulties, developed its possibilities,