ing history of mankind--separates
it so completely that a great gulf lies between, across which comparison
can scarcely pass, and on the other side of which a new world begins.

It has been the custom of our history to use the phrase the "new world"
to mark the discoveries of Columbus and the treasure-hunt of a Cortes or
a Pizarro. But what of that? The America that they annexed to Europe was
merely a new domain added to a world already old. The "new world" was
really found in the wonder-years of the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries. Mankind really entered upon it when the sudden progress of
liberated science bound the fierce energy of expanding stream and drew
the eager lightning from the cloud.

Here began indeed, in the drab surroundings of the workshop, in the
silent mystery of the laboratory, the magic of the new age.

But we do not commonly realize the vastness of the change. Much of our
life and much of our thought still belongs to the old world. Our
education is still largely framed on the old pattern. And our views of
poverty and social betterment, or what is possible and what is not, are
still largely conditioned by it.

In the old world, poverty seemed, and poverty was, the natural and
inevitable lot of the greater portion of mankind. It was difficult, with
the mean appliances of the time, to wring subsistence from the reluctant
earth. For the simplest necessaries and comforts of life all, or nearly
all, must work hard. Many must perish for want of them. Poverty was
inevitable and perpetual. The poor must look to the brightness of a
future world for the consolation that they were denied in this. Seen
thus poverty became rather a blessing than a curse, or at least a
dispensation prescribing the proper lot of man. Life itself was but a
preparation and a trial--a threshing floor where, under the
"tribulation" of want, the wheat was beaten from the straw. Of this
older view much still survives, and much that is ennobling. Nor is there
any need to say goodby to it. Even if poverty were gone, the flail
could still beat hard enough upon the grain and chaff of humanity.

But turn to consider the magnitude of the change that has come about
with the era of machinery and the indescribable increase which it has
brought to man's power over his environment. There is no need to recite
here in detail the marvelous record of mechanical progress that
constituted the "industrial revolution" of the eighteenth centur