IN ENGLAND, where industrialization first began in the mid-eighteenth century, great new cities as the centers of manufacture grew up, frequently where none had stood before. A large new class of proletarians, industrial workers, was also created out of under- and unemployed peasants and urban workers. The initial years of the industrial revolution brought great wealth to some a few, new industrial entrepreneurs, but enormous misery to many of the new working class. Nevertheless, by the mid-nineteenth century the per capita real income had doubled over the course of the past hundred years and most people connected with industry or the related and increased commercial activity benefited to a greater or lesser degree. Happiness however, is conditioned by more than material prosperity. Workers came to see themselves as cogs in a gigantic economic and political machine over which they had no influence. By the turn of the nineteenth century, England was in the midst not only of an economic revolution, but also a political and social transformation that can be seen as a second wave of the capitalist revolution that had already brought an end to the feudal-traditional society of the European Middle Ages. A political reform movement developed in England already at the time of the American Revolution, but none of the proposed franchise bills had passed. A revolution in France in 1830 combined with popular demonstrations on behalf of electoral reform ultimately culminated in the Great Reform Bill of 1832. It brought the voting franchise to the middle classes and redistributed seats in Parliament in accordance with shifts in the population brought about by the commercial and industrial revolutions. Still, Parliament represented only men of substance - about 12.5 per cent of the population. A two-party system had long been in place. The Conservatives (Tories) represented largely landed wealth and the Liberals (Whigs) new capital. The working classes were unrepresented, although it was their demonstrations which had convinced the elites that reform was preferable to revolution. In the last third of the century however, both parties gradually came to recognize that the inclusion of all in the electorate was essential to the modern state. Conservatives and Liberals competed with each other for the favor of prospective voters by sponsoring bills widening the franchise until by the beginning of the twentieth century most workingmen with fixed residences had the right to vote. In the last years before the outbreak of the First World War, the Liberal Party began a substantial move to create a modern welfare state for the benefit of the lower classes. This drove many of the party's original bourgeois adherents to the Conservative Party, which became the party of wealth, both landed and commercial-industrial. The working class however remained suspicious of the Liberals and began to develop a party of their own (Labour). After the First World War, it emerged as the second major party, while the Liberal Party declined into a small centrist party, usually of little consequence in the formation of British governments.