3.  Changes in technology, advances in science, the replacement of landlords, clergymen and soldiers by businessmen and professionals, including the military, as the recognized leaders of the modern society, put social control in the hands of a new ruling bourgeois class;

4.  The bourgeois revolution brought into existence two other classes:  the industrial proletariat as an ally and/or an acceptable leader of the peasant masses of Europe.  At the same time it enlarged the middle class to a point at which it was able to play a decisive role in the formulation and direction of social policy in industrialized communities.

5.  Fragments of the industrial proletariat and the greatly enlarged middle class came together in an avowedly revolutionary movement:  socialism-communism, which reached the power summit between 1910 and 1917.

   6.  The bourgeoisie countered with a cold war aimed to exterminate
   socialism-communism, using propaganda, petty
   reform and armed intervention as its chief agencies.

7.  The high birth rate, the prolongation of life and mass education provided society with a substantial body of skilled, experienced, socially conscious, alert citizens, increasingly aware of the historical changes through which they were living and determined to intervene whenever their well-being was threatened.

   8.  Extension and equalization of opportunity opened the way
   for an informed citizenry to express itself and defend its
   interests.

9.  Emerging planet-wide social consciousness spread an awareness that the concerns, plans and programs of any part of the human family are of vital importance to the whole of mankind.

Change is a universal force which operates in nature, in society, in man himself.  At times it takes place so gradually that one day seems like another.  At other times it operates with furious energy, turning things upside-down overnight.  Such change, whether it takes place in nature or in society is revolutionary.

Rome’s demise as a world power was followed by centuries of quietude—­The Dark Ages.  These in turn yielded to a period of revolutionary change that found its early expression in the voyages and discoveries that spanned the earth after 1450.  Three centuries later the rebirth of western humanity expressed itself in the industrial revolution that flooded across the planet and became an early stage of the planet-wide sweep that has played havoc with nature, turned the old society upside down and presently promises to produce a new society for a reborn human race.

World-wide revolution is the predominant force in the twentieth century.  Its existence and some of its consequences have become an all-embracing theme for thought and discussion.  They have put into the hands of present-day humanity the ideas, experiments and experiences needed for transforming nature, rebuilding social institutions and practices and opening the way for mankind to move confidently into a future replete with intriguing and exciting possibilities.