Every year saw some new invention that increased the product per man, the development of some new advertising device, the conquest of some new territory or the delimitation of some new “sphere of influence,” and the revelation of some new possibility in the covetousness of man.  Profits rose to new heights and accumulating dividends clamoured for new opportunities for investment.  Competition tended to cut down returns, therefore labour was more and more sustained through diminished wages and laws that savagely prevented any concerted effort towards self-defense.  Improvements in agricultural processes and the application of machinery and steam power, together with bulk-production and scientific localization of crops, threw great quantities of farm-labourers out of work and drove them into the industrial towns, while advances in medical science and in sanitation raised the proportion of births to deaths and soon provided a surplus of potential labour so that the operation of the “law of supply and demand,” extolled by a new philosophy and enforced by the new “representative” or democratic and parliamentary government, resulted in an unfailing supply of cheap labour paid wages just beyond the limit of starvation.

At last there came evidences that the limit had been reached; the whole world had been opened up and pre-empted, labour was beginning to demand and even get more adequate wages, competition, once hailed as “the life of trade” was becoming so fierce that dividends were dwindling.  Something had to be done and in self-defense industries began to coalesce in enormous “trusts” and “combines” and monopolies.  Capitalization of millions now ran into billions, finance became international in its scope and gargantuan in its proportions and ominousness, advertising grew from its original simplicity and naivete into a vast industry based on all that the most ingenious professors could tell of applied psychology, subsidizing artists, poets, men of letters, employing armies of men along a hundred different lines, expending millions annually in its operations, making the modern newspaper possible, and ultimately developing the whole system of propaganda which has now become the one great determining factor in the making of public opinion.

When the twentieth century opened, that industrialism which had begun just a century before, had, with its various collateral developments, financial, educational, journalistic, etc., become not only the greatest force in society, but as well a thing operating on the largest scale that man had ever essayed:  beside it the Roman Empire was parochial.