(2) _Higher standards of individual efficiency and comfort_. The physical welfare of the individual has been promoted to a greater degree, or at all events preached more eloquently, within the last few generations than ever before. This has doubtless been due to changes in the commonplace everyday life of all the people. It must be remembered that in the fifteenth century man did the ordinary things of life in much the same manner as did early Romans or Greeks or Egyptians, and that our present remarkable ways of living, of working, and of traveling are the direct outcome of the Commercial Revolution of the sixteenth century and of the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth. (3) _Intensification of political organization, with attendant public guarantees of personal liberties_. The ideas of nationalism and of democracy are essentially modern in their expression. The notion that people who speak the same language and have a common culture should be organized as an independent state with uniform laws and customs was hardly held prior to the fifteenth century. The national states of England, France, and Spain did not appear unmistakably with their national boundaries, national consciousness, national literature, until the opening of the sixteenth century; and it was long afterwards that in Italy and Germany the national idea supplanted the older notions of world empire or of city-state or of feudalism. The national state has proved everywhere a far more powerful political organization than any other: its functions have steadily increased, now at the expense of feudalism, now at the expense of the church; and such increase has been as constant under industrial democracy of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as under the benevolent despotism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But in measure as government has enlarged its scope, the governed have worked out and applied protective principles of personal liberties. The Puritan Revolution, the French Revolution, the American Revolution, the uprisings of oppressed populations throughout the nineteenth century, would be quite inexplicable in other than modern times. In fact the whole political history of the last four centuries is in essence a series of compromises between the conflicting results of the modern exaltation of the state and the modern exaltation of the individual.