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,