• fjQ ' . ENGLISH SAGrA

cals or quakers—who gave up their leisure hours to teach in
ragged schools or to organise clubs, sports and benefit societies
for their poorer neighbours. In this way, not for the first time
in England's history, the destruction wrought by her own
tumultuous vitality was redeemed in part by the operation of
her own generous conscience.

But the evil was deeply rooted, and the remedy, for all the
energy and enthusiasm behind it, so ill-co-ordinated and tardy
that those who prophesied revolution and social chaos1 might
have been proved right had it not been for one over-riding factor.
The social maladies that provoked revolt were not destroyed
though they were henceforward slowly but steadily mitigated.
On the other hand, while diminishing in intensity, they con-'
tinued to grow in extent through further urbanisation. Revolu-
tion was avoided by extending the area of exploitation. But
the very factor which most hastened that process ended the isola-
tion of the industrial areas from the rest of the community.
The railways had already been decisive in the suppression of the
rebellion: an express train had brought a critical appeal for help
from Preston to Manchester, and the Guards had been transferred
from London to Lancashire in the course of a single night.
Rapid internal communication and a new habit of travel, born
of cheap transport, was within a few years to transform England
and give her a new unity and orientation.

*Engels expected a further and probably decisive revolutionary crisis in 1847, or at
latest 1853. The Condition of the Working Class in England zy/b.