Page:James Ramsay MacDonald - The Socialist Movement.pdf/28

 24 European communities were cut up and carved according to the vain wills of soldiers and diplomatists; generations had to pass before nations found the boundaries, and citizens the groupings, which were natural to them and within which alone they could develop themselves. Europe took a century to recover from the shock and the shattering which it received when France rose and swept the old away in torrents of blood and by the brute force of armies.

In Great Britain, where the change took place without disruption, we can trace the current of progress much more easily than we can trace it anywhere else. The man who was to be born "free and equal" was the man of property, the man belonging to the middle class. The richer members of that class had used their wealth particularly during the eighteenth century for the purposes of political bribery. "To acquire political power at the expense of the country gentlemen was the first and one of the chief causes of that political corruption which soon overspread the whole system of parliamentary government" (History of the Eighteenth Century. Lecky, vol. i. p. 202). The rich man was enfranchised in 1832 and immediately proceeded to settle the political policy of the state as an honest citizen; his religious views were accepted and he won his religious freedom; his economic interests became predominant. He required only the most rudimentary form of social organisation for his protection. An