ABSTRACT
IN the last two centuries man has brought into being entirely new conditions for human life. Two of his age-long preoccupations-the harnessing of power and the conquest of diseasehave quite suddenly passed over into a phase of enormously accelerated growth, which in effect has created a qualitatively new situation. If a Roman of the Empire could be transported some eighteen centuries forward in time he would have found himself in a society which he could without too great a difficulty have learned to comprehend. Horace would have felt himself reasonably at home as the guest of Horace Walpole, and Catullus would soon have learned his way about among the sedan chairs, the patched-up beauties and flaring torches of London streets at night. But if the time translation had lasted for another two centuries they would have found themselves in the position of bewildered children, their daily life dominated by the automobile, the telephone, the inexorable time-table of relationships with innumerable people who form inescapable links in ever-ramifying chains of administrative arrangements without which the simplest necessities of life, a draught of water (from a municipally-owned water supply), a visit to a friend (on a public bus service), the reading of a book (from a public library) cannot be carried on. For the common man, who had no privileged position but earned his living by his own labour, the change would have been even greater. The rural peasant or blacksmith of Roman times would find his modem counterpart, the urban industrial or clerical worker, as strange as a being of a different species.
