habitable globe, or the devices and utensils of domestic life

between the days of the early Egyptians and the days when

Christopher Columbus was a child. Of course, there were

inventions and changes, but there were also retrogressions;

things were found out and then forgotten again; it was, on the

whole, a progress, but it contained no steps; the peasant life

was the same, there were already priests and lawyers and town

craftsmen and territorial lords and rulers doctors,wise women,

soldiers and sailors in Egypt and China and Assyria and

south-eastern Europe at the beginning of that period, and they

were doing much the same things and living much the same life as

they were in Europe in A.D. 1500. The English excavators of the

year A.D. 1900 could delve into the remains of Babylon and Egypt

and disinter legal documents, domestic accounts, and family

correspondence that they could read with the completest sympathy.

There were great religious and moral changes throughout the

period, empires and republics replaced one another, Italy tried a

vast experiment in slavery, and indeed slavery was tried again

and again and failed and failed and was still to be tested again

and rejected again in the New World; Christianity and

Mohammedanism swept away a thousand more specialised cults, but

essentially these were progressive adaptations of mankind to

materialconditions that must have seemed fixed for ever. The

idea of revolutionary changes in the materialconditions of life

would have been entirely strange to humanthought through all

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