Then came the war and swept aside these last remnants of the old feudal fabric of society. The lower classes took hold of the government. Some few among the former officials were too old to change the habits of a lifetime. They pawned their orders and died. The vast majority, however, surrendered to the inevitable. From childhood on they had been educated to regard business as a low profession, not worthy of their attention. Perhaps business was a low profession, but they had to choose between an office and the poor house. The number of people who will go hungry for the sake of their convictions is always relatively small. And so within a few years after the great upheaval, we find most of the former officers and state officials doing the sort of work which they would not have touched ten years ago and doing it not unwillingly. Besides, as most of them belonged to families which for generations had been trained in executive work and were thoroughly accustomed to handle men, they have found it comparatively easy to push ahead in their new careers and are today a great deal happier and decidedly more prosperous than they had ever expected to be. What business is today, the Church was sixteen centuries ago. It may not always have been easy for young men who traced their ancestry back to Hercules or to Romulus or to the heroes of the Trojan war to take orders from a simple cleric who was the son of a slave, but the simple cleric who was the son of a slave had something to give which the young men who traced their ancestry back to Hercules and Romulus and the heroes of the Trojan war wanted and wanted badly. And therefore if they were both bright fellows (as they well may have been) they soon learned to appreciate the other fellow’s good qualities and got along beautifully. For it is one of the other strange laws of history that the more things appear to be changing, the more they remain the same.