as given us! The business to which steel and steam
and electricity, explosives and poisons have recently been put does not
indicate that humanity's problem is solved when new power is put into
our hands. Even the power of wide-spread communication can so be used
that a war which began in Serajevo will end with lads from Kamchatka
and Bombay blasted to pieces by the same shell on a French battlefield.
Even the power of modern finance can be so used that nations will
exhaust the credit of generations yet unborn in waging war. How some
folk keep their cheap and easy optimism about humanity's use of its new
energies is a mystery. We have come pretty near to ruining ourselves
with them already. If we do not achieve more spiritual control over
them than we have yet exhibited we will ruin ourselves with them
altogether. Once more in history a whole civilization will commit
suicide like Saul falling on his own sword.

The scientific control of life, by itself, creates more problems than
it solves. The problem of international disarmament, for example, has
been forced on us by the fear of that perdition to the suburbs of which
our race has manifestly come through the misuse of scientific
knowledge. Humanity is disturbed about itself because it has
discovered that it is in possession of power enough to wreck the world.
Never before did mankind have so much energy to handle. Multitudes of
people, dubious as to whether disarmament is practical, are driven like
shuttles back and forth between that doubt, upon the one side, and the
certainty, upon the other, that armament is even less practical. The
statisticians have been at work upon this last war and their figures,
like the measurements of the astronomers, grow to a size so colossal
that the tentacles of our imaginations slip off them when we try to
grasp their size. The direct costs of this last war, which left us
with more and harder difficulties than we had at the beginning, were
about $186,000,000,000. Is that practical? At the beginning of 1922
almost all the nations in Europe, although by taxation they were
breaking their people's financial backs, were spending far more than
their income, and in the United States, far and away the richest nation
on the planet, we faced an enormous deficit. Is that practical? In
this situation, with millions of people unemployed, with starvation
rampant, with social revolution stirring in every country--not because
people are b