单选题 The great chariot of society, which for so long had run down the gentle slope of tradition, now found itself powered by an internal combustion engine. Transactions and gain 21 a new and startling 22 force.
What forces could have been 23 powerful to smash a comfortable and 24 world and institute in its place this new society? There was no single massive 25 . It was not great events, single adventures, individual laws, or charming 26 which 27 about the economic revolution. It was a process of internal growth.
First, there was the gradual emergence of national political 28 in Europe. A second great current of change was to be found in the slow decay of the religious spirit under the 29 of the skeptical, inquiring, humanist views of the Italian Renaissance. Still another 30 current lies in the slow social changes that eventually 31 the market system possible. In the 32 of this change, power naturally began to gravitate into the hands of those who understood money matters-the merchants.
Perhaps most important of all in the pervasiveness of its effect was a rise in scientific curiosity. 33 the world would wait until the age of Adam Smith for its 34 burst of technology, the Industrial Revolution could net have taken place had not the ground been prepared 35 a succession of basic sub-industrial discoveries.
No single one of these currents, acting by itself, could have turned society 36 . Indeed, many of them may have been as much the 37 as the causes of a great convulsion in human organization. History turns no 38 corners, and the whole vast upheaval sprawled out over time. Evidences of the market way of life sprang up side by side with older traditional ways, and remnants of the former day 39 long after the market had for all practical purposes taken over the 40 principle of economic organization.