r all the world over;
but, unlike the file and the chisel, the needle and the hammer, books
not only create, but suggest. A new idea is like an electric current set
running throughout the world, and no man can say into what channels of
activity it may not be directed.

But neither travel nor conquest nor books and the spread of ideas caused
so immense a transformation in the common life of mankind as the process
beginning at the end of the eighteenth century which is known to
historians as the Industrial Revolution. As we have spoken of the
conquest of distance perhaps a better name for the Industrial
Revolution would be the Conquest of Organization. For it was not the
discovery of the steam-engine or the spinning-jenny which constituted
the revolution: it was the fact that men were now in a position to apply
these discoveries to the organization of industry. The ancient Greeks
played with the idea of the steam-engine: it was reserved for
eighteenth-century England to produce a generation of pioneers endowed
with the knowledge, the power, the foresight, and the imagination to
make use of the world-transforming potentialities of the idea. The
Industrial Revolution, with its railways and steamships, telegraphs and
telephones, and now its airships and submarines and wireless
communication, completed the conquest of distance. Production became
increasingly organized on international lines. Men became familiar with
the idea of an international market. Prices and prospects, booms and
depressions, banking and borrowing, became international phenomena. The
organization of production led to an immensely rapid increase of wealth
in Western Europe. The application of that wealth to the development of
the world's resources in and outside Europe led to a correspondingly
huge advance in trade and intercourse. The breakfast-table in an
ordinary English home to-day is a monument to the achievements of the
Industrial Revolution and to the solid reality of the economic
internationalism which resulted from it. There is still poverty in
Western Europe, but it is preventable poverty. Before the Industrial
Revolution, judged by a modern standard, there was nothing but poverty.
The satisfying physical and economic condition which we describe by the
name of comfort did not exist. The Italian historian Ferrero, in one of
his essays, recommends those who have romantic yearnings after the good
old times to spend one night on what our forefathers