past sixty years, a history which has no counterpart in the annals of
humanity. Sixty, eighty years ago, England was a country like every
other, with small towns, few and simple industries, and a thin but
_proportionally_ large agricultural population. To-day it is a country
like _no_ other, with a capital of two and a half million inhabitants;
with vast manufacturing cities; with an industry that supplies the world,
and produces almost everything by means of the most complex machinery;
with an industrious, intelligent, dense population, of which two-thirds
are employed in trade and commerce, and composed of classes wholly
different; forming, in fact, with other customs and other needs, a
different nation from the England of those days. The industrial
revolution is of the same importance for England as the political
revolution for France, and the philosophical revolution for Germany; and
the difference between England in 1760 and in 1844 is at least as great
as that between France, under the _ancien regime_ and during the
revolution of July. But the mightiest result of this industrial
transformation is the English proletariat.

We have already seen how the proletariat was called into existence by the
introduction of machinery. The rapid extension of manufacture demanded
hands, wages rose, and troops of workmen migrated from the agricultural
districts to the towns. Population multiplied enormously, and nearly all
the increase took place in the proletariat. Further, Ireland had entered
upon an orderly development only since the beginning of the eighteenth
century. There, too, the population, more than decimated by English
cruelty in earlier disturbances, now rapidly multiplied, especially after
the advance in manufacture began to draw masses of Irishmen towards
England. Thus arose the great manufacturing and commercial cities of the
British Empire, in which at least three-fourths of the population belong
to the working-class, while the lower middle-class consists only of small