The characteristics of a community producing chiefly in this manner are poverty, or at least only a moderate prosperity, but, to offset this, a certain definiteness and steadiness of all relations.

Now, on the other hand, through the incessant and complete action and reaction which I have been describing to you, there had appeared in the community a totally different kind of work, and therefore of all relations of life.  There had already appeared the germ of the same characteristic which today marks, in a differently developed but enormously extended manner, the production of the community.  In the tremendous development which it has today this characteristic, in contrast to that previously described, can be indicated as follows:  Whereas, formerly, need preceded production, made it a consequence of itself, determined it, and formed a criterion and well-known standard for it—­production and supply now go in advance of the demand and try to develop it.  Production is no longer for the locality, no longer for the well-known need of neighboring markets, but for the world-market.  Production goes on for remote regions and for a general market, for all continents, for an actually unknown and not definitely calculated need; and in order that the product may arouse need a weapon is supplied it—­cheapness.  Cheapness is the weapon of a product, with which, on the one hand, it obtains customers, and, on the other, drives from the field other goods of the same nature, which are likewise urged upon the consumers; so that under the system of free competition any producer may hope, no matter what enormous quantities he may produce, to find a market for them all if he only succeeds, by making his goods exceedingly cheap, in keeping out of the market the goods of his competitors.  The predominant character of such a society is vast and boundless wealth, but, on the other hand, a great instability of all relations, an almost continual, anxious insecurity in the position of each individual, together with a very unequal sharing of the returns of production among those taking part in it.

Thus great had been the changes brought about, unnoticed in the heart of society, by the revolutionary and all-pervading activity of industrialism, even before the end of the eighteenth century.

Though the men of the Peasant Wars had not ventured any other conception than that of founding the State upon land ownership, though they had not, even in thought, been able to free themselves from the view that land ownership is necessarily the element which holds sovereignty over the State and that participation in that ownership is the condition for participation in that sovereignty, yet the quiet, imperceptible, revolutionary progress of industrialism had brought about the condition that, long before the end of the eighteenth century, land ownership had become an element stripped entirely of its former importance, and had fallen to a subordinate position, in the face of the development of new methods of production, of the wealth which this development bore in its bosom and increased from day to day, and of the influence which it clearly had on all the people and their affairs—­even upon the largely impoverished nobility.