Page:James Ramsay MacDonald - The Socialist Movement.pdf/46

trial Revolution came, the manufacturer was not specially wealthy. He lived, as a rule, like a workman enjoying a substantial income. But wealth rapidly accumulated in his hands. He drew away, both in his social status and his ideals, from the people from whom he came. He formed a plutocratic class all by himself. The influence of the change was enormous. The aristocracy opened its doors to the new rich, for the aristocracy needed money. The exploiters of the virgin soil of America, its speculators, its financiers, supplied the incomes which our aristocracy required; our own rich families acquired titles. Nominally birth was retained as the hall mark of aristocracy, but wealth was in reality its foundation. Thus it has come about that the social effect of the Industrial Revolution has been the establishment of customs and distinctions which depend solely upon the possession of wealth, and which have led to the use of that wealth in selfish and anti-social directions. Wealth divorced from social responsibility, but held and used purely as a personal possession, has divided society into the two great separate kingdoms of rich and poor, each living its own life and very rarely coming into contact with the other. Slumming, charitable activities, patronising interferences, have taken the place of those personal relationships which used to exist between hut and hall before the feeling of social solidarity was destroyed by a huge factory and town population, the clearance of the people from the soil, and the class distinctions which