NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS 371 the military protection of forces in British pay under British officers, territory being ceded by the protected state in order to meet the cost. Hence British territory was considerably extended before 181 5, while the protected states were also under British control, though not under direct British government. The Industrial Revolution. A series of mechanical inventions and discoveries, chiefly made in Great Britain during the latter part of the eighteenth and the earlier part of the nineteenth century, were destined entirely to revolutionise the processes of manufacture in all countries, though Great Britain was the first to profit by them. First, machinery worked by hand enabled one worker to produce a very much larger amount of work in a given time. Then machinery driven by water-power multiplied production ; and then machinery driven by steam-power displaced that driven by water-power. Where machinery was set up, workers congregated ; and thus great manu- facturing towns came into being. Great Britain obtained a tremendous lead over the rest of the world, partly from natural advantages, partly because her soil alone was not devastated by the Napoleonic wars ; while, as we have seen, Napoleon's continental system presented her with the whole sea-borne trade of Europe. The End of Feudalism. At the close of the Middle Ages, Feudalism ceased to be the basis of military organisation. The essence of feudalism is the exchange of service for protection ; that of the modern community is the exchange of service for wages, the state being responsible for protection. Modern military organisation began when the state paid its troops instead of depending on feudal levies. But feudalism all over Europe established a hereditary dis- tinction between the protecting class who owned the land and the class who rendered them service. The claim to service was main- tained while the claim for protection lapsed. The strong continued to hold their privileges. Politically, feudalism yielded to absolutism ; that is, the central governments were able to control the great feudatories ; but the subordinate classes were still not admitted to political rights. Socially, feudalism remained, that is, the class dis- tinctions and the privileges of the hereditary landowners were scarcely abated, except in the British isles ; where, in England at least, the classes merged in each other without the sharp dividing lines of continental Europe. The French Revolution destroyed hereditary divisions and hereditary privileges in France, and greatly weakened them throughout Europe ; they still survived with modifica- tions, but they ceased to be regarded as fundamental laws on which the existence of social order depended.
