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 democratic
one of transforming the British Empire into a commonwealth of equal
states. Now that the _Times_ has been converted, we may be sure that
the universe itself has come round to the side of the right, and has
taken up the cause of the poor. By the pricking of my thumbs I know
that something better than civilization this way comes. Dull indeed
must be that man whose blood does not tingle with anticipation. Yet the
physical inventions of the twentieth century are not to be compared in
pregnancy of good with its less palpable, its spiritual, novelties.

XX. AGAINST THE MATERIALISTIC VIEW OF HISTORY

Before pass