Once Western man was stripped of his spiritual heritage and the social defenses that Christendom offered him, the ground was prepared for his complete material subjugation. The corruption of ideas bled inexorably into the physical destruction of the Natural Order. The mercantile elite of the 18th century did not invent misery, but institutionalized it in the form of a new utilitarian machinery: the Industrial Revolution.

In the classical order, the family operated as a true ecclesia domestica (domestic church) and an organic unit of labor. The home was not a mere shelter against the elements, but the epicenter of moral and productive life. The artisan and the peasant worked where they lived, and the offspring were educated at the feet of their parents, absorbing the craft, the virtue, and the sense of duty through continuous imitation and shared life.

Nevertheless, the nascent liberal State and the new utilitarian oligarchy, already unbound from the moral scruples that the Church imposed against greed, initiated a brutal process of expropriation. Through iniquitous legislation—such as the Enclosure Acts in England—the communal lands, which for centuries had guaranteed the basic sustenance of families, were confiscated and transformed into private pastures for the textile industry. Landless, without the ancient Craft Guilds, and without the charity of the plundered monasteries, man faced absolute starvation.

It was the desperation for survival, and not some supposed desire for “social advancement,” that expelled the father from his domestic workshop. Cornered, he was forced to sell the strength of his arms to the coal mines and the deafening factories of the urban centers. Shortly thereafter, as the man’s degrading wage was not enough to sustain life, the same hunger dragged the woman and, not infrequently, the children themselves into exhausting and inhumane workdays.

In this exact historical moment, the exile of the home was sealed. The family residence was emptied of its vital purpose. It ceased to be the sanctuary of human formation and the center of production, converting into a dismal dormitory—a mere waystation where exhausted bodies retreated only to minimally restore their strength before returning to the gears at the break of dawn. The sacred unity of the family was shattered by the factory whistle.

The consequences for childhood were devastating. With the parents enslaved by the machine during most of their waking hours, the children who were not on the production lines suddenly found themselves orphans of living parents. Wandering through gray streets or locked away in miserable dwellings, they became, in the eyes of the managers of the new oligarchy, an inconvenience. The offspring ceased to be viewed as immortal souls to be ordered toward the Supreme Good, and began to be treated as a mere “logistical problem”: what to do with the children while the adults turn the wheel of the economy?

The exiled childhood needed a holding pen. And the leaders of the modern State, astute in their desire for power, saw in this abandonment the perfect opportunity to strike the final blow. They would not offer those children High Culture, rectitude of character, or true education. They engineered, under the guise of benevolence, a new kind of mental prison, designed to extinguish intelligence and forge blind obedience.