became the chief desire of the plebeian rich. Thus public spirit and responsibility have become weakened, and we have less guarantee than ever that the control of wealth is to be other than purely selfish. Moreover, whilst the moral relationships between rich and poor have been weakening, the power of wealth has been increasing by leaps and bounds. This increase must be traced out, as it is an important link in the chain of socialist evolution.
Although the conflict between capital and labour began very early in our industrial history, and the employer never seems to have been unwilling to beat down wages to competitive levels,[1] it was not till the eighteenth century had well advanced to its close that the two classes of capitalists and workmen became separated; that the journeyman began to become obsolete, and that the chance of a substantial proportion of the wage-earners becoming employers in due time tended to disappear. Mechanical invention increased the amount of capital required in business, the extension of the market intensified competi-
- ↑ For instance, Macaulay refers in his History of England (vol. i., p. 204) to a ballad sung on the streets of Leeds and Norwich and now preserved in the British Museum, as "the vehement and bitter cry of labour against capital. It describes the good old times when every artisan employed in the woollen manufacture lived as well as a farmer. But these times were past. Sixpence a day was now all that could be earned by hard labour at the loom. If the poor complained that they could not live on such a pittance, they were told that they were free to take it or leave it."
