The revolution was therefore an accomplished fact in the actual relations of society long before it broke out in France; and it was only necessary to bring this reversal of conditions to outward recognition to give it legal sanction.  This is always the case in all revolutions.  You can never make a revolution.  You can only give external legal recognition and logical embodiment in practice to a revolution which has already become an actuality in the essential relations of society.  Trying to make a revolution is the folly of immature men who have no conception of the laws of history.

Precisely for this reason it is just as immature and childish to suppress a revolution already fully formed in the womb of society and to oppose its legal recognition, or to reproach those who assist at its birth with being revolutionary.  If the revolution is at hand in the actual conditions of society, nothing can prevent its appearing and passing into legislation.

How these things were related, and how far they had already gone in this direction in the period of which I speak, you will best see from another matter which I will mention.

I have already spoken about the division of labor, the development of which consists of separating all production into a series of entirely simple mechanical operations requiring no thought on the part of the operator.  As this separation progresses farther and farther, the discovery is finally made that these single operations, because they are quite simple and call for no thought, can be accomplished just as well, and even better, by unthinking agents; and so in 1775, fourteen years before the French Revolution, Arkwright invented the first machine, his famous spinning-jenny.

We can see that the machine in itself was not the cause of the revolution.  Too little time intervened between this invention, which furthermore was not immediately introduced into France, and the revolution; but it embodied in itself the actually incipient and fully ripe revolution.  This machine, however innocent it seemed, was in fact the revolution personified.  The reasons for this are simple.  You, of course, have heard of the guild system, by which production in the Middle Ages was directed.  The guild system of the Middle Ages was inseparably connected with other institutions.  The guilds lasted through the whole medieval period up to the French Revolution; but as early as 1672 the matter of their abolition was considered in the German parliament, though without result.  Even in 1614, in the French Etats Generaux, the abolition of the guilds was demanded by the middle class, whose production the guilds everywhere restricted; but also without result.  Indeed thirteen years before the Revolution, in 1776, a minister of the Reformed party in France, the famous Turgot, abolished the guilds, but the privileged world of medieval feudalism considered itself, and with perfect justice, in mortal danger if its vital principle of privilege did not extend to all classes of society; and so, six months after the abolition of the guilds, the king was empowered to revoke this edict and to reestablish the guilds.  Nothing but the Revolution could overthrow (and it did overthrow in one day, by the capture of the Bastille) that which in Germany had been vainly assailed since 1672 and in France since 1614—­for almost two centuries—­by legal means.