At the same time the thought crossed his mind that Lawyer Settembrini could scarcely have been much of a jurist, considering his other occupations and the extended sphere of his activities. His grandson asseverated, however, and Hans Castorp found it credible, that the grandfather had been from early childhood down to the last day of his life inspired by the fundamental principle of justice. Our hero, all heavy-headed as he was and organically preoccupied by the six-course Berghof meal he had just eaten, made an effort to understand what Settembrini meant when he called this principle “the source and fount of liberty and progress.” Progress, up to now, had had to do, in Hans Castorp’s mind, with such things as the nineteenth-century development of cranes and lifting-tackle. He was accordingly gratified to learn that Grandfather Settembrini had not underestimated the importance of such matters. Of course, his own grandfather hadn’t either. The Italian paid a tribute to the native land of his two listeners, for the inventions of gunpowder⁠—whereby the armour of feudalism had been thrown on the scrapheap⁠—and the printing-press, which had made possible the democratic propagation of ideas, and the propagation of democratic ideas, which were one and the same.