a second
to read the lines. Others are a bit slower. Still others take from
twenty to thirty seconds. Finally those men and women who do not read
any more than they can help, get the point when the brighter ones among
the audience have already begun to decipher the next cut-in. It is not
different in human life, as I shall now show you.

In a former chapter I have told you how the idea of the Roman Empire
continued to live for a thousand years after the death of the last Roman
Emperor. It caused the establishment of a large number of "imitation
empires." It gave the Bishops of Rome a chance to make themselves the
head of the entire church, because they represented the idea of Roman
world-supremacy. It drove a number of perfectly harmless barbarian
chieftains into a career of crime and endless warfare because they were
for ever under the spell of this magic word "Rome." All these people,
Popes, Emperors and plain fighting men were not very different from you
or me. But they lived in a world where the Roman tradition was a vital
issue something living--something which was remembered clearly both
by the father and the son and the grandson. And so they struggled and
sacrificed themselves for a cause which to-day would not find a dozen
recruits.

In still another chapter I have told you how the great religious
wars took place more than a century after the first open act of the
Reformation and if you will compare the chapter on the Thirty Years War
with that on Inventions, you will see that this ghastly butchery took
place at a time when the first clumsy steam engines were already
puffing in the laboratories of a number of French and German and English
scientists. But the world at large took no interest in these strange
contraptions, and went on with a grand theological discussion which
to-day causes yawns, but no anger.

And so it goes. A thousand years from now, the historian will use the
same words about Europe of the out-going nineteenth century, and he
will see how men were engaged upon terrific nationalistic struggles
while the laboratories all around them were filled with serious folk who
cared not one whit for politics as long as they could force nature to
surrender a few more of her million secrets.

You will gradually begin to understand what I am driving at. The
engineer and the scientist and the chemist, within a single generation,
filled Europe and America and Asia with their vast machines, with their
teleg