H THE WORLD MACHINE 



Look round upon the modern world, with its wealth, its 

 broadened humanism, its beautiful cities, the ease of displace- 

 ment, its universal culture, its patronage of science, the arts, 

 the ennoblement of labour, and consider, then, that a few 

 centuries ago our immediate forbears, the inhabitants of Great 

 Britain and of the German forests, were painted and tattooed 

 savages, who dwelt in huts of wattle and lived largely by the 

 chase. The Britons who met the invasion of Roman arms 

 dyed their bodies with blue woad ; the Scots who resisted 

 Agricola " fought naked and with short spears." Consider that 

 so late as the Norman Conquest, in the eleventh century, the 

 selling of men and women into slavery was a general custom 

 in all parts of England. " You might have seen with sorrow 

 long files of young people of both sexes and of the greatest 

 beauty, bound with ropes and daily exposed for sale." So 

 runs the word of a contemporary chronicler ; 1 and these were 

 not captives of another race, not blacks nor prisoners of war, 

 but " their nearest relatives and even their own children." 



Consider, again, that not its Parthenon, its Phidias, its Pericles, 

 its serene and beautiful religion, could save the Athenian civilisa- 

 tion from decay, which came doubtless through the ravages of 

 disease, the exhaustion of the soil, and ineffective resistance to 

 the inroads of the barbarian. Consider that the dominion of 

 the Romans, and again of the Arabians, each insuring over 

 wide areas the peaceful and pleasurable pursuit of life, were 

 to be almost utterly swept away ; and reflect that our modern 

 civilisation is secure. It fears no barbarian hordes ; it may 

 fight disease. The plague will never again sweep away half 

 the population of London. No fanatical sect will ever burn 

 the library of the British Museum. The hundred universities 

 of Europe and America, after a lapse of six or eight centuries, 

 will not, we may believe, be the haunts of bats and owls as a 

 hundred universities of the Saracens became. 



For all practical affairs, the theological, the ecclesiastical, the 

 persecuting spirit, is all but dead; it will pass, and it will 

 never return. In the political world there is a new order, an 

 industrial order, and in the intellectual world there is a new 

 method, the method of science. It is unbelievable that the 

 mind of man will ever again spend itself for centuries over the 

 arid and senseless disputes of scholasticism. It will not again 



1 Life of Bishop Wolstan, quoted by Taine, History of English Literature, 



