In the same way precisely, the motor-car, as every one knows, has "vanquished distance" and has "revolutionized suburban life." In England it is said to have made acute the issue of plural voting. In America it is hailed by the optimistic as the solution of the vexed problem of urban concentration and the decline of agriculture. Even as a means of recreation it is said by the initiated to transform the whole meaning of one's physical environment, exploiting new values in sky and air and the green earth, which pass the utmost possibilities of family "carry-all" or coach and four. Or consider the ocean steamship and its influence: today we travel freely over the world, for all manner of reasons, sufficient or otherwise. A hundred years ago distant journeyings by sea or land were arduous and full of peril, undertaken only by the most adventurous or the most curious or for urgent need. Now commodities of every sort can be transported to virtually every quarter of the globe--rails and locomotives, cement and structural steel, machinery of all kinds from the motor and the dynamo to the printing press and the cinematograph, in a word whatever is necessary to recreate the waste places of the earth and to make life in these regions humanly liveable. The sheer scale and magnitude of such operations lifts them above the level of the international trade of five hundred or even a hundred years ago. And their far-reaching results of every sort in the lives of nations and of individuals the world over can in no intelligible sense be understood as mere homogeneous multiples of what trade meant before our age of steam, iron, and electricity. Finally, we may think of modern developments in printing as compared, for example, with the state of the craft in the days when the New England Primer served to induct juvenile America into the pleasant paths of "art and literature." And it is clear that the mechanical art that makes books and reading both widely inviting and easily possible of enjoyment today is not merely a more perfect substitute for the quill and ink-horn of the mediaeval scribe or even for the printing press of Caxton or of Benjamin Franklin. The enormously and variously heightened "efficiency" of the mechanical instrumentalities nowadays available has for good and for evil carried forward the whole function of printing and publication into relations and effects which are qualitatively new and beyond the possible conception of the earlier inventors and readers.