But if the growth of national pride, the division of the church and the rise of modern languages and literatures have been centrifugal forces, they have been outweighed by the advent of new influences tending to bind all peoples together.

The place of a single church is taken by a common point of view, the scientific; the place of Latin as a medium of learning has been taken by English, French, and German, each one more widely known to those to whom it is not native now than ever was Latin in the earlier centuries.

The fruits of discovery are common to all nations, who now live under similar conditions, reading the same books and (under different names) the same newspapers, doing the same {452} business and enjoying the same luxuries in the same manner.

Even in matters of government we are visibly approaching the perhaps distant but apparently certain goal of a single world-state.
[Sidenote: Changes in population] In estimating the economic and cultural conditions of the sixteenth century it is therefore desirable to treat Western Europe as a whole.
One of the marked differences between all countries then and now is in population.

No simple law has been discovered as to the causes of the fluctuations in the numbers of the people within a given territory.
This varies with the wealth of the territory, but not in direct ratio to it; for it can be shown that the wealth of Europe in the last four hundred years has increased vastly more than its population.