So far as regards the Don-mechanical tadan ol culture, such a« religion, politics, and even business enterprise, the present is in a very large degree comparable with the scheme of things that prevailed on the Continent of Europe in the seventeenth century. And so far as the working of these cultural factors is undisturbed by forces that were not present in the older days, they should logically again work out in such a situation as came to prevail in Central Europe in the course of the eighteenth century. The modern situation, of course, is drawn on a larger scale ; but that is due to the intrusion of a new technology, a different "state of the industrial arts," and not to a aubstantially altered range of religious, political, or business conceptions. The pitch of squalor that characterized vulgar life in the busier Continental countries at the close of the great era of politics could probably not be reached again, but that again, is due, not to these spiritual factors of cultural growth, but to the altered state of the
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industrial arts. The factor in the modem situation that is alien to the ancient regime is the machine technology, with ita many and wide ramifications. Business conceptions and business methods were preseot in vigorous growth in Central Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as they had been in South Europe from a slightly earlier date ; although the large sweep of business enterprise is not had until a later date, being conditioned by the machine technology. Business methods and the apparatus of business traffic develop very promptly whenever and wherever the situation calls for them ; such ia the teaching of economic history.' There is nothing recondite about them, little that has to be acquired by a protracted, cumulative experience running over many