As the city lifted up its head over the countryside, as the burgher joined the noble and the priest and the urban spirit aspired to supremacy, writing, from being a herald of nobles’ fame and of eternal truths, became a means of commercial and scientific intercourse. The Indian and the Classical Cultures rejected the pretension and met the working requirement by importation from abroad; it was as a humble tool of everyday use that alphabetical script slowly won their acceptance. With this event rank, as contemporaneous and like in significance, the introduction into China of the phonetic script about 800, and the discovery of book-printing in the West in the fifteenth century; the symbol of duration and distance was reinforced in the highest degree by making it accessible to the large number. Finally the Civilizations took the last step and brought their scripts into utilitarian form. As we have seen, the discovery of alphabetical script in the Egyptian Civilization, about 2000, was a purely technical innovation. In the same way Li Si, Chancellor to the Chinese Augustus, introduced the Chinese standard script in 227. And lastly, amongst ourselves--though as yet few of us have appreciated the real significance of the fact--a new kind of writing has appeared. That Egyptian alphabetic script is in no wise a final and perfected thing is proved by the discovery of its fellow, our _stenography_, which means no mere shortening of writing, but _the overcoming of the alphabetic script by a new and highly abstract mode of communication_. It is not impossible, indeed, that in the course of the next centuries script-forms of the shorthand kind may displace letters completely. VIII