Bridge, with his men fighting under the standard of the Labarum, it was
subsequently found that the economic capital of civilization had silently
migrated from the Tiber to the Bosphorus, where Constantine seated himself
at Constantinople, which was destined to be the new capital of the world
for about eight hundred years. So in 1792, when the Prussians and the
French refugees together invaded France, they never doubted for an instant
that they should easily disperse the mob, as they were pleased to call it,
of Kellermann's "vagabonds, cobblers, and tailors." Nevertheless the
Germans recoiled on the slope of Valmy from before the republican army,
almost without striking a blow, nor could they be brought again to the
attack, although the French royalists implored to be allowed to storm the
hill alone, provided they could be assured of support. Then the retreat of
the Duke of Brunswick began, and this retreat was the prelude to the
Napoleonic empire, to Austerlitz, to Jena, to the dismemberment and to the
reorganization of Prussia and to the evolution of modern Germany: in
short, to the conversion of the remnants of mediaeval civilization into the
capitalistic, industrial, competitive society which we have known. And all
this because of the accelerated movement caused by science.

If it be, indeed, a fact that the victory of Chateau Thierry and the
subsequent retreat of the German army together with the collapse of the
German Empire indicate, as there is abundant reason to suppose that they
may, a shift in the world's social equilibrium, equivalent to the shift in
Europe presaged by Valmy, or to that which substituted Constantinople for
Rome and which was marked by the Milvian Bridge, it follows that we must
prepare ourselves for changes possibly greater than our world has seen
since it marched to Jerusalem under Godfrey de Bouillon. And the tendency
of those changes is not so very difficult, perhaps, roughly to estimate,
always premising that they are hardly compatible with undue optimism.
Supposing, for example, we consider, in certain of their simpler aspects,