The best way of understanding our own civilization is to take an ordinary sort of day in the life of an ordinary sort of man, myself for instance and to see what he does. My home is in London. I get up in the morning when an alarm clock rings on the table of my bed, it goes by clockwork and is quite a complicated machine. I get into a bath, the water for which has been heated by gas. The gas is supplied to me by the Gas Board for the area in which I live, it is part of a national system. The water is supplied by the City Water Board. After batheing I shave, the water for my shave comes from a kettle which has been heated by electricity. So far as I am concerned, what happens is very simple. I put a plug in the wall and press and switch and the electricity does the rest. I use a safety razor the blade of which made of very finely tempered steel has been cut, together with millions of other blades, by a machine. The clothes which I put on have also been spun and woven largely by steam or electrically driven machines. My dining-room is heated by a gas-fire, which is regulated by an automatic machine in the halll; I put a shilling in the machine and my fire will then bum for a given time. During breakfast I read in my paper of things that have happened all over the world. The report of these things have been brought to the newspaper office by telegraph, telephone and wireless and the paper has been prited by immensely powerful and complicated printing machines. After breakfast, I walk to the underground station and descend deep into the earth by means of a lift. This used to be worked by water-power, and is probably now worked by electricity. The train that takes me along the tube is also driven by electricity which is generated at an electric power station several miles away. I arrive at my station, am carried up to the surface of the earth by a moving staircase again worked by electricity, and take a bus to my office. The bus is driven by an engine, which works by exploding a gas made of petrol and air. At my office, I dictate letters to a shorthand writer, who types them out by means of another machine a typewriter. I also send telegrams to people hundreds of miles away and speak to them over, the telephone. The telegrams are sent by electric signals transmitted along wire and when I telephone my voice travels along another set of wires which perhaps run for part pf their way along the bottom of the sea. I have given only a few of the events of an ordinary day of an ordinary man, but you will see how in countless ways, in his work in his travelling and his amusements he relies on machinery. Whenever he wants to do anything or hear anytheing or go wnywhere, he calls upon machines to assist him. And the machines work by means of the power-steam, electricity, petrol or whatever it may be that man has won from nature. Now at first it might seem as if modern human beings who spend so much time getting help from machines are very lazy. For what are the machines for but to save people trouble? They are extra limbs which men have made outside themselves to do their wo rk for them. Cranes and lifts are extra arms to do the job of lifting, trains and motors are extra legs to do the job of walking and running. Typewriters and printing machines are extra brains to save us the trouble of remembering. We have even invented for ourselves new kinds of limbs and make aeroplane which take the place of the wings we have not got. And yet it is difficult to suppose that men would have invented these complicated machines to serve as their extra limbs merely because they were lazy; would they have taken all this trouble merely to save themselves trouble? And in fact man is not at all lazy; he is the most restless and energetic of all living creatures. Why is it, then, that man alone of all the animals has gone in the grouble of inventing so many devices for saving himself the labour of lifting and carrying and walking and rememnering? They are not the theings he really wants to do and so he gets the machines to do them for him in order that he may have time and energy for other things, for the things he really does want to do. What things? I cannot answer this question without saying something about the bad parts of our civilization. But it would not be fair to do this without first praising it for its good parts. What are they? First and for most there are order and safety. If today I have a quarrel with another man. I do not get neaten merely because I am physically weaker and he can knock me down. I go to law, and the law will decide as fairly as it can between two of us. Thus, in disputes between man and man right has taken the place of might. Moreover, the law protects me from robbery and violence. Nobody may come and break into my house, steal my goods or run of with my children. Of course there are burglars but they are very rare, and the law punishes them whenever it catches them. It is difficult for us to realize how much this safety means. Without safety those higher activities of mankind which make up civilization could not go on. The inventor could not invent, the scientist find out or the artist make beautiful things. Hence, order and safety, although they are not themselves civilization, are things without which civilization would be impossible. They are as necessary to our civilization as the air we breathe is to us and we have grown so used to them that we do not notice them any more then we notice the air. In spite of that, they are both new theings and rare things. Except for a short period under the Roman Empire, there have been order and safery in Europe only during the last teo hundred years, and even during that time ther have been several revolutions and a great many wars; thus it is a great achievement of our civilization that to-day civilized men should in their ordinary daily lives be practically free from the fear of violence. They are also largely free from the fear of pain. They still feel ill, but since the use of anesthetics became common, illness is no longer the terrible thing it used to be. And people are ill much less often. To be healthy is not to be civilized-savages are often healthy, although not so often as is usually supposed-but unless you have good health, you cannot enjoy anything or achieve anything. There have, it is true, been great men who have been incalids but their work was done in spite of their ill-health, and good as it was, it would have been better had they been well. Not only do men and women enjoy better health; they live longer than they ever did before, and they have a much better chance of growing up. Thirdly, our civilization is more secure than any that have gone before it. This is because it is much more widely spread. Most of the previous civilizations known to history came to an end because vigorous but uncivilized peoples broke in upon them and destroyed them. This was the fate of Babylon and Assyria, it happened over and over again in India and China; it brought about the end of Greece and the fall of Rome. Now, whatever the dangers which threaten our civilization, and they are many, it seems likely to escape this one. Previous civilizations, as I have said before, were specialised and limited; they were likes oases in surrounding desert of savagery. Sooner or later, the desert closed in and the oasis was no more. But today it is the oasis whivh is spreading over the world. The things in a grocer's shop, for instance, are from the ends of the earth; they come out of strange countries and over far off seas. There are oranges from Brazil, dates from Africa, rice from India, tea from China, sugar from Demerara. No great Caliph, no Eastern king, not even Solomon in all his glory, could draw on such rich stores of varied produce as the housewife who does her shopping at the grocer's. The fact that these things come to us from all over the world means that for the first time the world is becoming a single place, instead of a lot separate places shut of from one another. One might say that for centuries the nations of mankind lived in a number of separate boxes holding no communication with each other except when the people in one box invaded those in the next, and some of the boxes were never opened at all. Then came a time when there was constant coming and going between the boxes, so much so that the sides of the boxes were breaking down, and the world was beginning to look more like one enormous box. Wars and revolutions in this century unhappily put a stop to this, and the sides of some of the most important boxes have again been firmly closed. Russia and the countries under the same system are now shut in behind what is often called the 'the Iron Curtain'. Nevertheless, all the world's boxes have at some time been opened, so that there in no danger of any unknown people breaking upon out civilization from outside and destroying it. The danger comes rather from within; it is a danger from among ourselves. This brings me to out defects. In democratic countries men are equal before law and have a voice in deciding how and by whom they shall be governed. But the sharing-out of money which means the sharing-out of food and clothing and houses and books and so on is still very unfair. While some few people live in luxury, many hace not even enough to eat and drink and wear. Even in the finest of the world's cities thousands of people live in a single room; in this room they sleep and dress and wash and eat their meals; in this same room they are born, and in this same room they die. And they like this not for fun, but because they are too poor to afford another room. It is, I think, clear that until everyone gets his proper share of necessary and delightful things, our civilization will be far from perfect.