rsailles, built by that same King Louis XIV who had been such
a dangerous enemy to the Germans, the King of Prussia was publicly
proclaimed German Emperor and a loud booming of guns told the hungry
Parisians that a new German Empire had taken the place of the old
harmless Confederation of Teutonic states and stateless.

In this rough way, the German question was finally settled. By the
end of the year 1871, fifty-six years after the memorable gathering at
Vienna, the work of the Congress had been entirely undone. Metternich
and Alexander and Talleyrand had tried to give the people of Europe a
lasting peace. The methods they had employed had caused endless wars and
revolutions and the feeling of a common brotherhood of the eighteenth
century was followed by an era of exaggerated nationalism which has not
yet come to an end.

THE AGE OF THE ENGINE

BUT WHILE THE PEOPLE OF EUROPE WERE FIGHTING FOR THEIR NATIONAL
INDEPENDENCE, THE WORLD IN WHICH THEY LIVED HAD BEEN ENTIRELY CHANGED
BY A SERIES OF INVENTIONS, WHICH HAD MADE THE CLUMSY OLD STEAM ENGINE OF
THE 18TH CENTURY THE MOST FAITHFUL AND EFFICIENT SLAVE OF MAN

THE greatest benefactor of the human race died more than half a million
years ago. He was a hairy creature with a low brow and sunken eyes, a
heavy jaw and strong tiger-like teeth. He would not have looked well in
a gathering of modern scientists, but they would have honoured him as
their master. For he had used a stone to break a nut and a stick to lift
up a heavy boulder. He was the inventor of the hammer and the lever, our
first tools, and he did more than any human being who came after him
to give man his enormous advantage over the other animals with whom he
shares this planet.

Ever since, man has tried to make his life easier by the use of a
greater number of tools. The first wheel (a round disc made out of an
old tree) created as much stir in the communities of 100,000 B.C. as the
flying machine did only a few years ago.

In Washington, the story is told of a director of the Patent Office
who in the early thirties of the last century suggested that the Patent
Office be abolished, because "everything that possibly could be invented
had been invented." A similar feeling must have spread through the
prehistoric world when the first sail was hoisted on a raft and the
people were able to move from place to place without rowing or punting
or pulling from the shore.

Indeed one of the most intere