874 POSTSCRIPT 
as it did the industry and commerce of the time—appears to 
have produced a general diffused increase of comfort, in 
England at all events, but it certainly led to the accumulation 
ad up of large fortunes. This was also the case in the sixteenth 
of great and seventeenth centuries; the moneyed class rose in im- 
ontaihety portance; there was a steady trend of new men, who had 
been successful in the City, to fill up the ranks of the landed 
gentry; but the merchants and financiers continued to grow 
in wealth and power. The farmers of the taxes under 
Charles IL, the goldsmiths in the Restoration period, and the 
company promoters of the time of Queen Anne were men 
who often rose from small beginnings to be the possessors of 
large fortunes. The new accession of wealth during the last 
half-century has brought about an improved standard of 
comfort among the working classes generally! and among 
the middle classes, and modern conditions have also afforded 
opportunities for the accumulation of unprecedented fortunes 
in business. The poor are not growing poorer, but the very 
rich are becoming much richer. There were not a few 
complaints of the disintegrating influence which the absentee 
landlords and new men exercised in Elizabethan and Stuart 
times, and the millionnaire of the present day also seems to 
find it difficult to choose, among the various continents, the 
one in which he prefers to make his headquarters, to discern 
his duty to his neighbours there, and to do it. 
The rise of individuals to great wealth, in the seventeenth 
century, was associated with changes in the methods of 
business organisation. The civic and municipal gilds had 
fallen into decay, and the companies, which strove to carry on 
a regulated trade on national lines, failed to justify their 
existence. Commerce came to be conducted on new principles, 
and each individual was free to push his business as best he 
could; or it was handed over to joint-stock companies which 
enjoyed large concessions and judicial and military status. 
The whole of the elaborate system, by which efforts had been 
made in the Middle Ages to secure and enforce good order in 
commercial transactions, or in industrial life,broke down utterly 
and for ever. Free competition triumphed over the methods 
of careful organisation, and the right to freedom in bargaining, 
1 Giffen. Essays in Finance. Second Series. 405 
and in 
changes in 
business 
organisa- 
On.