science is not standing still. In speaking of the scientific revolution I have not been speaking of a phenomenon that was confined to the Nineteenth Century. Rather we are just at the beginning of the revolution. We could not stop it if we would. It is advancing by leaps and bounds, gaining in impetus with each year. It is giving us more machines, faster machines, machines increasingly more intricate and complex. In the Seventeenth Century Sir Thomas Browne wrote: "It is too late to be ambitious. The great mutations of the world are acted." Not long ago the New York Times made the following statement in a full-page advertisement: "When Peary reached the Pole in 1909, after twenty-three years of effort, it took five months to get the news to New York. Now Commander Byrd flies to the Pole in a few hours, and the story of this occurrence of yesterday is in the New York Times to-day."

Life in the future will be speeded up infinitely beyond the present. Sources of energy will be tapped and harnessed far outrivalling what we have to-day. There lies in full view before us a realm of discovery in physical science till now untrodden by mortals even in their dreams. The pioneers are already upon the road to this promised

land. In California at the present moment a combined attack, financed and equipped on a huge scale, is being launched on the problem of the structure of matter; and the same search is being eagerly prosecuted in laboratories all over the world. We now know that in atoms of matter there exists a store of energy incomparably more abundant and powerful than any over which we have thus far obtained control. If once we can liberate this force, what machines we can build! Steam and electricity will be an anachronism at which our children will laugh as we laugh at the hand loom and the spinning wheel. With a pound weight of this radioactive substance we will get as much energy as we now obtain from 150 tons of coal. Or another pound weight can be made to do the work of 150 tons of dynamite.

One hundred and fifty tons of dynamiteenough to blow a modern city into oblivion-compressed to a pound weight which might be held in the hand! No wonder that a sober-thinking scientist like Professor Frederick Soddy of Oxford University should write: "I trust this discovery will not be made until it is clearly understood what is involved." "And yet," he goes on to say, "it is a discovery that is sooner or later bound to

come.

row.

995

Conceivably it might be made to-mor

One has only to turn the pages back to 1914 to find the grounds for Professor Soddy's uneasiness. All the machines that ingenuity could invent were directed to the single purpose of human destruction. In a hundred laboratories, in a thousand arsenals, factories, and bureaus, physics and chemistry were harnessed to the task of mass death. The gigantic success of the enterprise is shown in the statistics: 10,000,000 known dead soldiers; 3,000,ooo presumed dead soldiers; 13,000,000 dead civilians; 20,000,000 wounded; 3,000,000 prisoners; 9,000,000 war orphans; 5,000,000 war widows; 10,000,000 refugees.

This was the tabulation that our mechanical civilization made possible. This is the result of creating machinery for which we have no method of control. This is the consequence of giving children matches to play with. The former British Secretary of War, Winston Churchill, sums up the situation in these sombre paragraphs:

"It is established that nations who believe their life is at stake will not be restrained from using any means to secure their existence. It is probable-nay, certain-that among the means which will next time be at their disposal will be

agencies and processes of destruction wholesale, unlimited, and perhaps, once launched, uncontrollable.

"Mankind has never been in this position before. Without having improved appreciably in virtue or enjoying wiser guidance, it has got into its hands for the first time the tools by which it can unfailingly accomplish its own extermination. That is the point in human destinies to which all the glories and toils of men have at last led them. Death stands at attention, obedient, expectant, ready to serve, ready to shear away the peoples en masse; ready, if called on, to pulverize without hope of repair what is left of civilization. He awaits only the word of command. He awaits it from a frail, bewildered being, long his victim, now-for one occasion only-his Master." "

This, then, is the problem: science will not wait for man to catch up. It does not hold itself responsible for the morals or capacities of its human employers. It gives us a fire engine with which to throw water to extinguish a fire; if we want to use the engine to throw kerosene on the fire, that is our lookout. The engine is adapted to both purposes. With the same hand, science gives us Xrays and machine guns, modern surgery and high explosives, anæsthetics and poison gas. In brief, science has multiplied man's physical powers ten thousand fold and in like ratio has increased his capacity both for construction and destruction. How is that capacity to be used in the future? How can we hold in check the increasing physical

power of disruptive influences? Have we spiritual assets enough to counterbalance the new forces? How can we breed a greater average intelligence? Can education run fast enough, not only to overcome the lead which science has obtained, but to keep abreast in the race? Can the old savage be trusted with the new civilization which he has created?

These are ugly questions. They are hurled as a challenge at our generation, and upon their answers the future depends. What the answers are no intelligent person pretends to know. We are wandering in heartbreaking perplexity, swamped by the paraphernalia of living, weighed down by mountains of facts, trying to find some sure path out of this jungle of machinery and untamed powers, some principle of synthesis that will afford a way of escape. And the tragedy of it all is that there was a time when we thought we knew the answers to the riddles that this modern life of ours was propounding. Up until 1914 most of us were fairly confident of the result, fairly easy about the future. We had entered the Twentieth Century imbued with the complacent philosophy of Her