Had they lived in better-organized communities, their labours would have been turned to greater advantage, and would have benefited a greater number of their fellow men. But the day of capitalism and mass-production had not yet come. The splendid achievements of an Archimedes only served to benefit a tyrant, and his single-handed scientific fight against the Romans ended in disaster to his beloved city. In Greek and Roman days, owing to the lop-sided organization of human society, scientific discoveries could only benefit a few powerful people. The downtrodden underlings were unaffected by the work of the Pathfinders. They had to await the dawn of the Industrial Age before they could take part in the progress of the _élite_. Yet it must be put to the credit of the Hieros, the Medicis, and the greater of the Bourbon and Stuart Kings that they fostered the advancement of science and protected the Pathfinders from the persecution of ecclesiastical and other vultures. The invention of gunpowder laid low the chivalry of the Middle Ages. The Hobbling God triumphed over the mail-clad monopolist on horseback. The Sudden Fire armed the foot-soldier with a winged shaft of death. The stone-thrower had became the unerring sharp-shooter. The range of human power increased apace. The glass-blower with his fiery furnace produced cunning contrivances of glass which increased the range of the human eye twenty or thirty-fold. A free philosopher like Spinoza could discourse of the fundamental substance without fear or favour, since the grinding of optical glasses assured him an independent livelihood. Then came the French Revolution with its clarion call to a wider organization of humanity, which was eventually brought about, not by speeches and pamphlets, but by the harnessing of coal to inaugurate the Mechanical Age. The nineteenth century saw the fulfilment of the dream of an organized Humanity, a human world unified, not by the spread of humanitarian philosophies, but by the material bonds of progress.