"Capitalism in the 19th century did not doom the worker to a life of perpetual poverty. Instead, they kept creating new and better-paying employments as the decades went by. They produced the wealth and rising income that resulted in the emergence of a phenomenon completely new to human history: a self-supporting and educated middle class that grew more and more as they lower classes bettered their economic well-being."

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It hurt the economic historians, the Marxists and the fabians, to admit that the Ten Hour Bill, the basic piece of 19th century legislation, came down from the top, out of aa nobleman's private feelings about the Gospel, or that the abolition of the slave trade was achieved, not through the operation of some "law" of profit and loss, but peurlet as the result of tyhe new humanitarianism of the Evangelicals.

— Barbara Tuchman