This transformation was, indeed, unprecedented in the world's history. Hitherto man's material progress had been a gradual evolution. With the exception of gunpowder, he had tapped no new sources of material energy since very ancient times. The horse-drawn mail-coach of our great-grandfathers was merely a logical elaboration of the horse-drawn Egyptian chariot; the wind-driven clipper-ship traced its line unbroken to Ulysses's lateen bark before Troy; while industry still relied on the brawn of man and beast or upon the simple action of wind and waterfall. Suddenly all was changed. Steam, electricity, petrol, the Hertzian wave, harnessed nature's hidden powers, conquered distance, and shrunk the terrestrial globe to the measure of human hands. Man entered a new material world, differing not merely in degree but in kind from that of previous generations. When I say "Man," I mean, so far as the nineteenth century was concerned, the white man of Europe and its racial settlements overseas. It was the white man's brain which had conceived all this, and it was the white man alone who at first reaped the benefits. The two outstanding features of the new order were the rise of machine-industry with its incalculable acceleration of mass-production, and the correlative development of cheap and rapid transportation. Both these factors favoured a prodigious increase in economic power and wealth in Europe, since Europe became the workshop of the world. In fact, during the nineteenth century, Europe was transformed from a semi-rural continent into a swarming hive of industry, gorged with goods, capital, and men, pouring forth its wares to the remotest corners of the earth, and drawing thence fresh stores of raw material for new fabrication and exchange. Such was the industrially revolutionized West which confronted an East as backward and stagnant in economics as it was in politics and the art of war. In fact, the East was virtually devoid of either industry or business, as we understand these terms to-day. Economically, the East was on an agricultural basis, the economic unit being the self-supporting, semi-isolated village. Oriental "industries" were handicrafts, carried on by relatively small numbers of artisans, usually working by and for themselves. Their products, while often exquisite in quality, were largely luxuries, and were always produced by such slow, antiquated methods that their quantity was limited and their market price relatively high. Despite very low wages, therefore, Asiatic products not only could not compete in the world-market with European and American machine-made, mass-produced articles, but were hard hit in their home-markets as well.