the accumulated foresight and control of the universe outside of man which had been storing itself up more and more for ninety thousand years in the intellects and wills of the favored few. The floodgates were opened for the first time in the fifteenth century, and this godlike energy flowed in among the people at large, so that man, the many, the multitude, were quickened by it into hope on earth, unto life here and now, into liberty, creative originality, and the joy of self-realization.

But it was only the beginning: the effects of the introduction of gunpowder, the compass, the printing-press and paper, and the new ideas about the heavens, and the opening-up of relatively uninhabited lands, were scarcely discernible for two centuries, and then only as a destructive force. Indeed, for still another hundred years the process was one chiefly of disintegration. There was taking place a transference of power from the few to the many; a diffusion of sovereignty, as well as a redistribution of wealth; and the change was accompanied by an awakening of the masses to the meaning of the transformation which they were undergoing. The people began to realize that the invention of gun-powder had raised the peasant as a fighter to the level of the armed knight; that the compass and the opening-up of the Western hemisphere made it possible for the poor to escape from European masters whom they were unable to vanquish; and that the cheapness of books was linking the minds of the masses to the sources of learning and of religious tradition. It cannot but excite our mystic wonder that for nearly one hundred thousand years every new mastery of man over physical Nature was such that it inevitably played into the hands of rulers by strengthening their monopoly of initiative; and that then, at last, and ever since the fifteenth century after Christ, each new mechanical invention or discovery has had the unintended and undesired effect ultimately of scattering among the many the pent-up power of owners and rulers, and of creating in the many fresh psychic energy and a new capacity of invention.

This great process of levelling-up took again an enormous leap forward in the middle of the nineteenth century. The steam-engine advanced it almost as much as all the fifteenth-century inventions and discoveries together. The new facilities of travel brought new experiences, and these, by the psychological law of contrast and novelty, stimulated intelligence many-fold. The new speed in transportation made it possible for thousands to escape from oppression where scarcely one had been able to do so in former generations. The Irish peasants began to pour into America; then followed the Germans; soon Russians and Latins were helped to leave the Old World; sometimes in all came a million-odd in one year. Wealth was multiplied and scattered to a degree that had never been dreamed to be possible. Not only in the United States, but in France, Italy, Scandinavia, the British Empire, and South America, the diffusion of social initiative was taking place. First, power spread from the few to the many severally; but now, for a quarter of a century, the many, without surrendering, have been pooling their new power in the general will of the nation. There, in the unified and unifying purpose of nations like America, and of each of her federate States, the power is being safeguarded for the community and for its members severally by political devices which render public servants incapable of prolonged usurpation.

XIX. CIVILIZATION FACES ITS SUCCESSOR

Still, the new order is far from being in the ascendant. As civilization began with the introduction of the use of fire, but was not triumphant until the invention of written language, so the new order—call it what you will: Christianity, the Meaning of America, the Dream of California, the Wisconsin Idea, Social Democracy, Humanity—this new order has only entered in as yeast which has not yet had a chance to leaven the whole lump. But the fermentation now goes on apace. The World-War is perhaps best understood when it is looked upon as a struggle of civilization against its successor. Alarmed and armed to the teeth, civilization (applied science organized on a basis of reasoned self-interest) is attempting to expand itself over territory which had been preempted and mapped out by social democracy, and was being devoted, in the spirit of the ideal commonwealth foreshadowed in Christian sentiment and Jewish prophecy, to the co-ordination of wealth and power on the principle of deference to the humanity in every man.

But more significant than the World-War of the passing away of the old order and its supersession by a new are the ten or twenty inventions, ideas, discoveries, and new social contacts which marked the first decade of the present century. No doubt even the World-War has been precipitated by the sudden inrush of these unprecedented forces, and the realization of their trend by the self-centred leaders of civilization.

It would seem that the civilized, anticipating a move on the part of the humanized, and fearing an appropriation of the benefits of new inventions, stole a march upon the unsuspecting. The result is, that we saw at the outset of the war the latest appliances seized upon by the upholders of arbitrary power, and only now, after the first shock of attack, are the builders of an earthly paradise demonstrating their ability and intention to turn all the forces of Nature and devices of reason to the service of each in the brotherhood of the common life. We are beginning to see, also, that every one of the latest inventions is such in its nature that soon victory must come to the cause of economic and political equality.

Even the cheapness of motor-cars will overtake the champions of industrial monopoly, who at the first used them for the hoarding of social power. The submarine can at the first only be turned against the freedom of the seas during times of peace. The aeroplane and the airship, more than any other instruments of locomotion, will assist in the diffusion of initiative among all the outlying and small nations of the earth. More than anything else they will assist the weak and the meek of the earth to rush together to one another's rescue; and wireless telegraphy, as soon as it is established universally, will sound to them the alarum in the twinkling of an eye. All the new inventions are, as it were, God's detectives for the exposing of the subtle and disguised crimes of the great; or they are God's captains for the mobilization of the scattered forces of the meek when the plot of an oppressor has been unearthed. The people need only to realize that the new inventions are by their very nature breakers of power-monopolies, in order to find in them an irresistible incentive to rise and act in the cause of world-wide democratic initiative. High explosives, the gas-engine, the giant gun, sheets of flame, deadly gases, all these are within the reach of Christ's little ones to encircle their kingdom-that-is-coming against the attacks of inhuman humans. The new inventions are humanity's destructors to annihilate civilization's destroyers.

I have specified some of the twentieth century's inventions to show that, like the compass and the printing-press, they will be scatterers of privileges to the masses. I might go on indefinitely adding to the list, but I will cite only one more. It was only in the last decade of the nineteenth century that a new way of making cheap paper was discovered—so cheap that it became possible to sell great dailies for one cent. But this practice was not established until the twentieth century. And it was only a few years ago that the greatest newspaper of the world—and a very stronghold of upper-class monopoly—was able, or driven, to reduce its price from threepence (six cents) to a penny. But I specify the case of the London Times because, like a miracle of divine healing, but entirely due to the cheapness of paper, is the change of its policy from that of brutal imperialism to the