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APPENDIX 
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United States; also the French revolution and the rise and fall of Napoleon. 
The greatest thing that has happened in those one hundred and fifty 
years, however, perhaps we do not often fully grasp. We know that this 
1s an age of machinery, that wonderful mechanisms have been invented, 
that the process of making things of all kinds has radically changed. We 
know that, before the period, there was scarcely any machinery in existence. 
The first steam engine only arrived at about that identical time. Textile 
machinery consisted of spinning wheels and hand looms. The enormous 
mass of machinery that is now at work is a new development; and it falls 
within those one hundred and fifty years. With it has come a complete 
reorganization of the economic life of mankind. It is now as utterly 
unlike what it was formerly as it would be if we had acquired the power 
to “summon spirits from the vasty deep” to do our work for us. 
“Quantity production” has ensued, and the countries that develop it can 
defy competition from any other quarter on earth. This has meant great 
corporations, which terrified us at first, though we discovered that they 
could be tamed and made to resemble working elephants rather than 
dinosaurs. They are working now and performing an indispensable funec- 
tion in world economy. They are helping to unify the life of the human 
race. There is no such thing as a really “national” economic system if, by 
that, we mean an activity confined within by the boundaries of any state. 
Economic society is world wide. Commercial laws and treaties have very 
little value unless they are inspired by a recognition of the essential unity 
of this great natural organism. 
Now the transformation of the old system into the present one is so 
complete that if a man of 1775 should come to life again and look about, 
he would think himself on a wholly different planet. He would recognize 
scarcely a trace of the economy he was used to take part in. If we should 
take him to a great department store and ask him to find something made 
by hand, he would have trouble in finding it. Only a microscopic part of 
the entire output is so made. All of it is wholly or in great part the product 
of machinery, much of which is automatic. It is as though the “genii of 
the lamp” were everywhere ready, at call, to create all manner of products 
in Aladdin-like profusion. 
Our visitor from the world of our grandparents would find that, in lieu 
of trade guilds, we have labor unions of a kind that he knew nothing of; 
and our corporations would strike him as something imported either from 
the celestial world or from the nether one. Holding companies would 
assuredly alarm him. The change that has meant all this has occupied 
only about a fiftieth part of the time covered by authentic history; and it 
is very much greater than the sum total of all previous changes that have 
fallen within that period. Men have made larger practical gains in a 
fiftieth part of the historic period than they had made in the previous 
forty-nine fiftieths of it. 
I am speaking primarily of changes in the economic system, and of those 
further changes which necessarily accompany them. The world is a different 
world, though the material substance of it is what it was. The dominant 
part of the life it sustains—the human part of it—is one great organism.