dge of military organization, in the science of war, and
in military leadership since the days of Hannibal and Caesar. A hundred
years ago, when this University was founded, the methods of
transportation did not differ in the essentials from what they had
been among the highly civilized nations of antiquity. Travellers and
merchandise went by land in wheeled vehicles or on beasts of burden,
and by sea in boats propelled by sails or by oars; and news was
conveyed as it always had been conveyed. What improvements there had
been had been in degree only and not in kind; and in some respects
there had been retrogression rather than advance. There were many
parts of Europe where the roads were certainly worse than the old
Roman post-roads; and the Mediterranean Sea, for instance, was by no
means as well policed as in the days of Trajan. Now steam and
electricity have worked a complete revolution; and the resulting
immensely increased ease of communication has in its turn completely
changed all the physical questions of human life. A voyage from Egypt
to England was nearly as serious an affair in the eighteenth century
as in the second; and the news communications between the two lands
were not materially improved. A graduate of your University to-day can
go to mid-Asia or mid-Africa with far less consciousness of performing
a feat of note than would have been the case a hundred years ago with
a student who visited Sicily and Andalusia. Moreover, the invention
and use of machinery run by steam or electricity have worked a
revolution in industry as great as the revolution in transportation;
so that here again the difference between ancient and modern
civilization is one not merely of degree but of kind. In many vital
respects the huge modern city differs more from all preceding cities
than any of these differed one from the other; and the giant factory
town is of and by itself one of the most formidable problems of modern
life.

Steam and electricity have given the race dominion over land and water
such as it never had before; and now the conquest of the air is
directly impending. As books preserve thought through time, so the
telegraph and the telephone transmit it through the space they
annihilate, and therefore minds are swayed one by another without
regard to the limitations of space and time which formerly forced each
community to work in comparative isolation. It is the same with the
body as with the brain. The machinery