for urgent need. Now commodities of
every sort can be transported to virtually every quarter of the
globe--rails and locomotives, cement and structural steel, machinery of
all kinds from the motor and the dynamo to the printing press and the
cinematograph, in a word whatever is necessary to recreate the waste
places of the earth and to make life in these regions humanly liveable.
The sheer scale and magnitude of such operations lifts them above the
level of the international trade of five hundred or even a hundred years
ago. And their far-reaching results of every sort in the lives of
nations and of individuals the world over can in no intelligible sense
be understood as mere homogeneous multiples of what trade meant before
our age of steam, iron, and electricity. Finally, we may think of modern
developments in printing as compared, for example, with the state of the
craft in the days when the New England Primer served to induct juvenile
America into the pleasant paths of "art and literature." And it is clear
that the mechanical art that makes books and reading both widely
inviting and easily possible of enjoyment today is not merely a more
perfect substitute for the quill and ink-horn of the mediaeval scribe or
even for the printing press of Caxton or of Benjamin Franklin. The
enormously and variously heightened "efficiency" of the mechanical
instrumentalities nowadays available has for good and for evil carried
forward the whole function of printing and publication into relations
and effects which are qualitatively new and beyond the possible
conception of the earlier inventors and readers.

Sec. 4. The real evolution in such cases of the coming of a new commodity
or a new instrument into common and established use is an evolution of a
more radical, more distinctly epigenetic type than the pictured stories
of the encyclopaedia-maker serve to suggest. At each forward step the
novelty makes possible not merely satisfactions more adequate as
measured by existing requirements or more economical in terms of cost,
but new satisfactions also for which no demand or desire before existed
or could possibly exist--satisfactions which, once become habitual, make
the contentment of former times in the lack of them hard to understand
or credit. And indeed the story is perhaps never quite one-sided; the
gain we reckon is perhaps never absolutely unmixed. There may be,
perhaps must in principle be, not only gain but loss. The books w