In the exercise of this control the world has already, in many respects, become a single organism. The conquest of distance in the fifteenth century was the beginning of a process which led, slowly but inevitably, to the widening of the boundaries of government. Two discoveries made about the same time accentuated the same tendency. By the invention of gunpowder the people of Europe were given an overwhelming military superiority over the dwellers in other continents. By the invention of printing, knowledge was internationalized for all who had the training to use it. Books are the tools of the brain-worker 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