The era of the English Reform Bill of 1832 presented difficulties and dangers to both state and church. For the state it set the task of achieving a social order—of forming a new social mind—in a period when social change had destroyed the basis of custom in English life and thought. The rise and growth of mechanized industry had produced both a new working class separated from the land and the processes of production and with only its labor to sell in return for a meager livelihood, and a new industrial middle class which, finding itself excluded from the rights and privileges of the state, had set about the task of acquiring a political position comparable to its new economic status. Though the latter group secured the passage of the Reform Bill, to secure social stability was a much more difficult task. The industrial society showed itself as a divided society, described by Disraeli as “two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy … as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets,” a society in whose towns a French writer of the period could discover “nothing but masters and operatives.”