"CONSIDER in what way the industrial system developed upon Capitalist lines. Why were a few rich men put with such ease into possession of the new methods? Why was it normal and natural in their eyes and in that of contemporary society that those who produced the new wealth with the new machinery should be proletarian and dispossessed? Simply because the England upon which the new discoveries had come was "already" an England owned as to its soil and accumulations of wealth by a small minority: it was "already" an England in which perhaps half of the whole population was proletarian, and a medium for exploitation ready to hand."
~Hilaire Belloc: The Servile State.
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