CHAPTER I. THE BACKGROUND

Three momentous things symbolize the era that begins its cycle
with the memorable year of 1776: the Declaration of Independence,
the steam engine, and Adam Smith's book, "The Wealth of Nations."
The Declaration gave birth to a new nation, whose millions of
acres of free land were to shift the economic equilibrium of the
world; the engine multiplied man's productivity a thousandfold
and uprooted in a generation the customs of centuries; the book
gave to statesmen a new view of economic affairs and profoundly
influenced the course of international trade relations.

The American people, as they faced the approaching age with the
experiences of the race behind them, fashioned many of their
institutions and laws on British models. This is true to such an
extent that the subject of this book, the rise of labor in
America, cannot be understood without a preliminary survey of the
British industrial system nor even without some reference to the
feudal system, of which English society for many centuries bore
the marks and to which many relics of tenure and of class and
governmental responsibility may be traced. Feudalism was a
society in which the status of an individual was fixed: he was
underman or overman in a rigid social scale according as he
considered his relation to his superiors or to his inferiors.
Whatever movement there was took place horizontally, in the same
class or on the same social level. The movement was not vertical,
as it so frequently is today, and men did not ordinarily rise
above the social level of their birth, never by design, and only
perhaps by rare accident or genius. It was a little world of