merchants and artificers, much less ridiculous, acted 
     merely from a view to their own interest, and in pursuit of 
     their own pedlar principles of turning a penny wherever a 
     penny was to be got. Neither of them had either 
     knowledge or foresight of that great revolution which the 
     folly of the one, and the industry of the other, was 
     gradually bringing about. It is thus that through the 
     greater part of Europe the commerce and manufacture of 
     cities, instead of being the effect, have been the cause 
     and occasion of the improvement and cultivation of the 
     country. (52)

     The French Revolution, long prepared by the 
homogenizing print process, as de Tocqueville will show us, 
followed the pattern of Ramist reasonings which as Ong 
stresses “while seldom advertised as serving the purposes of