Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II THE REVOLUTIONARY INFLUENCE OF PROTECTIVE TARIFFS Every Revolution has its period of incubation, during which the antagonisms which finally come to a head are gradually accumulating, and we have already seen that the World-Revolution was preceded by a whole decade of revolutions and national wars. This decade—we might even include in it the Boer War, which occurred four years earlier and marked an epoch in the development of English Imperialism—proved in any case that certain alterations had taken place in the structure of Capitalism. These new capitalistic phenomena, in so far as they were manifested in the foreign and commercial policy of the various states, were commonly described as Imperialism. The most striking economic feature of this Imperialism was the combination of the hitherto separated domains of industrial, commercial, and banking capital under the common control of high finance; and this combination, while it involved a closer organisation of Capitalism, at the same time brought abouta very remarkable increase of its economic as well as of its political energy and efficiency. Above all, however, this alteration in the structure of Capitalism exercised a far-reaching influence upon that central problem of historic development— the position of the various social classes in relation to the State. Since here that antagonism between Germany and England which is the origin of the World War first becomes clearly apparent, we must examine this development more closely. This antagonism between England and Germany .' is linked up with the antagonism between Free Trade and Protection. On the strength of her industrial predominance and of her political world position, England had adopted Free Trade, just as the young capitalistic classes of the Continent an...