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 be socially perceptible in the middle eighteenth century, has been the appearance of great masses of population having quite novel functions and relations in the social body, and together with this appearance such a suppression, curtailment, and modification of the older classes as to point to an entire disintegration of that system. The facies of the social fabric has changed, and—as I hope to make clear—is still changing in a direction from which, without a total destruction and rebirth of that fabric, there can never be any return.

The most striking of the new classes to emerge is certainly the shareholding class, the owners of a sort of property new in the world's history.

Before the eighteenth century the only property of serious importance consisted of land and buildings. These were "real" estate. Beyond these things were live-stock, serfs, and the furnishings of real estate, the surface aspect of real estate, so to speak, personal property, ships, weapons, and the Semitic invention of money. All such property had to be actually "held" and administered by the owner, he was immediately in connection with it and responsible for it. He could leave it only precariously to a steward and manager, and to convey the revenue of it to him at a distance was a difficult and costly proceeding. To prevent a constant social disturbance by lapsing and dividing property, and in the absence of any organised agency to receive lapsed property, inheritance and preferably primogeniture were of such manifest advantage that the old social organisation always tended in the direction of these institutions.