ABSTRACT
The capitalist spirit was mature, capital accumulation had reached a high stage of development, and there was in existence a class of industrial undertakers, active, buoyant and confident. A strong centralized administration had raised the national market at London to predominance and had forged wide markets overseas. The conservative traditions of the independent craftsman, his immobility and his resistance to large-scale control of productive operations, were fast disappearing, and in his place there was to hand an ever-swelling host of obedient and pliant dependent proletarians. The inventions in the textile industry, in the making of iron and in power machinery fell, therefore, in England on very kindly soil. They completed the process which had been progressing steadily for three centuries of reducing the independent craftsman to a dependent wage-earner and bringing his productive operations under the control of a capitalist undertaker.
