ble to do! We
should not only be able to use this uranium and thorium; not only should
we have a source of power so potent that a man might carry in his hand
the energy to light a city for a year, fight a fleet of battleships, or
drive one of our giant liners across the Atlantic; but we should also
have a clue that would enable us at last to quicken the process of
disintegration in all the other elements, where decay is still so slow
as to escape our finest measurements. Every scrap of solid matter in the
world would become an available reservoir of concentrated force. Do you
realise, ladies and gentlemen, what these things would mean for us?'

The scrub head nodded. 'Oh! go on. Go on.'

'It would mean a change in human conditions that I can only compare to
the discovery of fire, that first discovery that lifted man above the
brute. We stand to-day towards radio-activity as our ancestor stood
towards fire before he had learnt to make it. He knew it then only as
a strange thing utterly beyond his control, a flare on the crest of the
volcano, a red destruction that poured through the forest. So it is that
we know radio-activity to-day. This--this is the dawn of a new day in
human living. At the climax of that civilisation which had its beginning
in the hammered flint and the fire-stick of the savage, just when it
is becoming apparent that our ever-increasing needs cannot be borne
indefinitely by our present sources of energy, we discover suddenly the
possibility of an entirely new civilisation. The energy we need for our
very existence, and with which Nature supplies us still so grudgingly,
is in reality locked up in inconceivable quantities all about us. We
cannot pick that lock at present, but----'

He paused. His voice sank so that everybody strained a little to hear
him.

'----we will.'

He put up that lean finger again, his solitary gesture.

'And then,' he said. . . .

'Then that perpetual struggle for existence, that perpetual struggle to
live on the bare surplus of Nature's energies will cease to be the lot
of Man. Man will step from the pinnacle of this civilisation to the
beginning of the next. I have no eloquence, ladies and gentlemen, to
express the vision of man's material destiny that opens out before me. I
see the desert continents transformed, the poles no longer wildernesses
of ice, the whole world once more Eden. I see the power of man reach out
among the stars....'

He stopped abruptly with a