DEVELOPMENT OF PRODUCTION 237 



of the Monarchy. The successor of Clovis and of St. Louis fell 

 a victim to the Protestant Swiss merchant Necker. The Revolu- 

 tion was the triumph of the capitalist class, of the financiers and 

 merchants, over the monarchy, the hereditary aristocracy, and 

 the Church, aU of which were so many barriers opposed to the 

 formation of a dominating capitaHst class within the State. 

 After the Revolution, the State passed into the hands of the 

 financiers. All the progress realised by the appHed sciences 

 during the nineteenth century has but served the cause of this 

 new capitalist class. The development of the economic power 

 at the expense of the political and ecclesiastical powers is the 

 great historical feature of social evolution during the nineteenth 

 century. This development of the economic power has pro- 

 ceeded with extraordinary rapidity ; the Bank and the Stock 

 Exchange have gradually conquered the world. Formerly, when 

 the means of communication were so bad as to render trade even 

 between neighbouring States precarious, the producer was not 

 encouraged to produce more than a limited quantity. But 

 to-day each producer has — potentially, at any rate — the entire 

 world as his client. He does not any longer produce, as he did 

 a century ago, for the neighbouring markets alone ; his goods 

 are transported with ease, precision, and rapidity to the ends 

 of the earth, across thousands of miles of ocean. The telegraph, 

 the telephone, the submarine cable, have further increased the 

 power of the financial classes, and developed trade and com- 

 merce. Even as the seismological instruments at Greenwich 

 can register the shock of an earthquake occurring at the other 

 side of the globe, so does the Stock Exchange in London respond 

 to the slightest political shock in Pekin or Constantinople or 

 St. Petersburg. Not without reason has the Stock Exchange 

 been termed the " poUtical barometer." And this popular ex- 

 pression alone suffices to show the power which the economic 

 factor exercises over the political destinies of humanity to-day. 

 Economic expansion, instead of being a means to an end — that 



