ABSTRACT
Let us turn now to revolutions of a different order, namely, material revolutions. I will mention two of them. The great Industrial Revolution in England was most active from the middle of the eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century, although its operations extended a century before and a century after this period. Though essentially of a technical nature, it brought with it vast social and considerable political changes. One has only to think of the displacement of the landed gentry by the new plutocracy, the extension of the suffrage, and so on. In our own days we have seen a somewhat similar revolution initiated by Benz's discovery of the internal combustion engine. This has led to an ever increasing tempo in daily life, to a greater informality in dress and social manners, to an extensive urbanizing of the country, and, above all, to the loosening or destruction of local topographical bonds through the greater ease of communications. Now it will be noted that these material revolutions do not satisfy very well the criteria from which we started. They were not accomplished swiftly nor were they brought about by means of violence. They were not, it is true, entirely dissociated from violence. In the former revolution many lives were lost in industrial rioting against the new machinery, while the complacency with which we regard the horrific annual slaughter on our roads betokens an attitude toward violence which psychologically is not altogether remote from a willingness to inflict it. Furthermore, at least in the industrial revolution, a ruthlessness was manifested which in its callous disregard for human suffering, and in its replacement of beauty by ugliness, could only have proceeded from a group of instinctual activities similar to that which in other circumstances results in open violence. Perhaps it is the dim perception of this feature that makes us unhesitatingly apply the term revolution to a process which at first sight would appear to differ greatly from the other changes we class as revolutionary.
