sun once a year, and whirls
on its own axis once a day; a sixth was that indiscretion of
Christopher Columbus, whereby instead of over-populated India he opened
up a way to the vast and sparsely denizened Americas.

These events, each and severally and all together, produced in one
particular the same sort of effect as the use of fire and of the bow
and arrow, of pottery, the domestication of animals, and the smelting
of iron: they enhanced incalculably the mastery of man over matter. But
in the other particular characteristic of civilization they acted in
the very opposite direction from all preceding inventions. Instead of
entrenching the master in his monopoly of social power, instead of
furthering the differentiation of society into master and man, they all
played into the hands of the man. For the first time since the
beginning of human evolution, inventions checked the monopolization of
control over others. But the initiative that now flowed to the
multitude of nobodies was not that puny freedom and narrow scope of
self-realization which the talking ape had enjoyed. It was 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