on and acquire firmer control of the conditions, or perish
miserably by the vengeance certain to fall on the
half-hearted meddler in great affairs. We may indeed compare
civilized man to a successful rebel against Nature, who, by
every step forward, renders himself liable to greater and
greater penalties, and so cannot afford to pause or fail in
one single step. Or again we may think of him as the heir to
a vast and magnificent kingdom, who has been finally
educated so as to take possession of his property, and is at
length left alone to do his best; he has wilfully abrogated,
in many important respects, the laws of his mother Nature by
which the kingdom was hitherto governed; he has gained some
power and advantage by so doing, but is threatened on every
hand by dangers and disasters hitherto restrained: no
retreat is possible--his only hope is to control, as he
knows that he can, the sources of these dangers and
disasters.

The time will come, not too long hence, as I believe, when men have
realized, with the scientists, that the world is one kingdom not many,
and these problems of man's relation to his non-human environment will
be the first concern of statesmen and governors. In some of our tropical
colonies they have, perforce, become so already. If you live on the Gold
Coast, the war against malaria cannot help seeming more important to you
than the war against German trade: and in parts of Central Africa the
whole possibility of continued existence centres round the presence or
absence of the tsetse fly which is the carrier of sleeping sickness.
Some day, when means have been adopted for abating our fiercer
international controversies, we shall discover that in these and kindred
matters lies the real province of world-politics. When that day comes
the chosen representatives of the human race will see their
constituents, as only philosophers see them now, as the inheritors of a
great tradition of service and achievement, and as trustees for their
successors of the manifold sources of human happiness which the advance
of knowledge has laid open to us.

If the first and most important of these sources is the discovery of
the conditions of physical well-being, the second is the discovery of
means of communication between the widely separate portions of man's
kingdom. The record of the process of bringing the world under the
control o