raphs, their flying machines, their coal-tar products. They
created a new world in which time and space were reduced to complete
insignificance. They invented new products and they made these so cheap
that almost every one could buy them. I have told you all this before
but it certainly will bear repeating.

To keep the ever increasing number of factories going, the owners, who
had also become the rulers of the land, needed raw materials and coal.
Especially coal. Meanwhile the mass of the people were still thinking in
terms of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and clinging to the
old notions of the state as a dynastic or political organisation. This
clumsy mediaeval institution was then suddenly called upon to handle the
highly modern problems of a mechanical and industrial world. It did
its best, according to the rules of the game which had been laid down
centuries before. The different states created enormous armies and
gigantic navies which were used for the purpose of acquiring new
possessions in distant lands. Whereever{sic} there was a tiny bit of
land left, there arose an English or a French or a German or a Russian
colony. If the natives objected, they were killed. In most cases they
did not object, and were allowed to live peacefully, provided they did
not interfere with the diamond mines or the coal mines or the oil mines
or the gold mines or the rubber plantations, and they derived many
benefits from the foreign occupation.

Sometimes it happened that two states in search of raw materials wanted
the same piece of land at the same time. Then there was a war. This
occurred fifteen years ago when Russia and Japan fought for the
possession of certain terri-tories which belonged to the Chinese people.
Such conflicts, however, were the exception. No one really desired to
fight. Indeed, the idea of fighting with armies and battleships and
submarines began to seem absurd to the men of the early 20th century.
They associated the idea of violence with the long-ago age of unlimited
monarchies and intriguing dynasties. Every day they read in their papers
of still further inventions, of groups of English and American and
German scientists who were working together in perfect friendship for
the purpose of an advance in medicine or in astronomy. They lived in
a busy world of trade and of commerce and factories. But only a few
noticed that the development of the state, (of the gigantic community of
people who recogni