I think that a glance at
American history will show this estimate to be within the truth. At the
same time such rapidity of intellectual mutation is without precedent,
and I should suppose that the mental exhaustion incident thereto must be
very considerable.
In America, in 1770, a well-defined aristocracy held control. As an
effect of the Industrial Revolution upon industry and commerce, the
Revolutionary War occurred, the colonial aristocracy misjudged the
environment, adhered to Great Britain, were exiled, lost their property,
and perished. Immediately after the American Revolution and also as a
part of the Industrial Revolution, the cotton gin was invented, and the
cotton gin created in the South another aristocracy, the cotton
planters, who flourished until 1860. At this point the changing of the
environment, caused largely by the railway, brought a pressure upon the
slave-owners against which they, also failing to comprehend their
situation, rebelled. They were conquered, suffered confiscation of their
property, and perished. Furthermore, the rebellion of the aristocracy at
the South was caused, or at all events was accompanied by, the rise of a
new dominant class at the North, whose power rested upon the development
of steam in transportation and industry.
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