physical welfare of the individual has been promoted to a greater
degree, or at all events preached more eloquently, within the last few
generations than ever before. This has doubtless been due to changes in
the commonplace everyday life of all the people. It must be remembered
that in the fifteenth century man did the ordinary things of life in
much the same manner as did early Romans or Greeks or Egyptians, and
that our present remarkable ways of living, of working, and of
traveling are the direct outcome of the Commercial Revolution of the
sixteenth century and of the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth.

(3) _Intensification of political organization, with attendant public
guarantees of personal liberties_. The ideas of nationalism and of
democracy are essentially modern in their expression. The notion that
people who speak the same language and have a common culture should be
organized as an independent state with uniform laws and customs was
hardly held prior to the fifteenth century. The national states of
England, France, and Spain did not appear unmistakably with their
national boundaries, national consciousness, national literature, until
the opening of the sixteenth century; and it was long afterwards that
in Italy and Germany the national idea supplanted the older notions of
world empire or of city-state or of feudalism. The national state has
proved everywhere a far more powerful political organization than any
other: its functions have steadily increased, now at the expense of
feudalism, now at the expense of the church; and such increase has been
as constant under industrial democracy of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries as under the benevolent despotism of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. But in measure as government has enlarged its
scope, the governed have worked out and applied protective principles
of personal liberties. The Puritan Revolution, the French Revolution,
the American Revolution, the uprisings of oppressed populations