e of a great city
creates problems of health, of family life, and social control which did
not exist when men lived in the open, or in villages. Just as the human
body generates the poisons that eventually destroy it, so the communal
life, in the very process of growth and as a result of its efforts to
meet the changes that its growth involves, creates diseases and vices
which tend to destroy the community. This raises the problem in another
form. Communities may and do grow old and die, but new communities
profiting by the experience of their predecessors are enabled to create
social organizations, more adequate and better able to resist social
diseases and corrupting vices. But in order to do this, succeeding
communities have had to accumulate more experience, exercise more
forethought, employ more special knowledge and a greater division of
labor. In the meantime, life is becoming constantly more complex. In
place of the simple spontaneous modes of behavior which enable the lower
animals to live without education and without anxiety, men are compelled
to supplement original nature with special training and with more and
more elaborate machinery, until life, losing its spontaneity, seems in
danger of losing all its joy.

Knowledge accumulates apace and its applications threaten the
very existence of civilized man. The production of the flying
machine represented a considerable advance in mechanical
knowledge; but I am unaware of any respect in which human
welfare has been increased by its existence; whereas it has not
only intensified enormously the horrors of war, and, by
furnishing criminal and other undesirable characters with a
convenient means of rapid and secret movement, markedly
diminished social security, but it threatens, by its inevitable
advance in construction, to make any future conflict virtually
equivalent to the extermination of civilized man. And the
maleficent change in the conditions of human life which the
flying machine has produced from the air, the submarine
parallels from the depths of the sea; indeed, the perception of
this truth has led to the very doubtfully practicable
suggestion that the building of submarines be made illegal....

Moreover if life itself is more secure, there is at the present
moment a distinct tendency towards a diminution of personal
liberty. The increasing control by the st