In his opinion, the concentration of capital and worker alienation was not a necessary side effect of the industrial revolution, but a historical accident due to the fact that a few families in Britain had already grabbed most of the wealth centuries before. Belloc believed that the golden age of commerce had already occurred, in the late middle ages, when serfdom had largely decayed and been replaced by a system of independent agriculturalists and laborers, owning small amounts of property, and protected by guilds. Belloc charts a gradual process of the dispossession of small property holders into propertyless laborers completely dependent upon capitalists for their daily bread. Belloc observes that we are caught in a paradox. Belloc's complex but eminently logical analysis is as follows.
Modern capitalism involves the concentration of ownership in a very few people.
It is practical and easily accomplished for the state to purchase or nationalize what they own. It is far less practical to cause the distribution of property to a larger number of small holders. Belloc makes the familiar point that we can point to past times when the distributive state succeeded, but cannot successfully find a time in history when collectivism worked. He believes it is an impossible dream, perpetrated by idealists and autocrats. He regards capitalism, however, as being a destroyer of the distributive state.