Real Revolution — Page 7
7 the project remaind in abeyance; until the queen found means to support it out of her own personal resources. . The New World was then discovered from which the. Spain of those days derived immense benefit. . In short, there was once a time when even welleducated and learned people laughed at the idea that the earth was round; but today even little children at school can reel off argument after argument to establish that the earth has the form of a globe. The whole world has now come to accept the theory. . Thus, there are things which take time to become popular in the world: sometimes they replace things which had occupied the field before; but often they do not replace them completely. Winning a place for themselves, they begin thenceforth to exist side by side with the others, as for instance we find that locomotion has come to exist side by side with the old means of transport. When railway transport was first adopted in Britain, people, it is said, used to lie down on the track, vowing they would rather die than let the new mode of transport come into vogue; but soon the railways spread all over the country in a net-work. . When the telephone was first introduced into Mecca, many Arabs said that Shaitan (Satan) was being brought into the country, and Ibn-Saud began to be so unpopular that a spirit of revolt started to simmer in his army. . When Ibn-Saud realised the seriousness of the matter and decided to tackle it firmly, he asked why they called it a "thing of Satan". The reply was: "What