t "the world does not change." But I hope
that you will not pay much attention to such talk. You see, it took
our ancestors almost a million years to learn how to walk on their
hind legs. Other centuries had to go by before their animal-like
grunts developed into an understandable language. Writing--the art of
preserving our ideas for the benefit of future generations, without
which no progress is possible was invented only four thousand years ago.
The idea of turning the forces of nature into the obedient servants of
man was quite new in the days of your own grandfather. It seems to me,
therefore, that we are making progress at an unheard-of rate of speed.
Perhaps we have paid a little too much attention to the mere physical
comforts of life. That will change in due course of time and we shall
then attack the problems which are not related to health and to wages
and plumbing and machinery in general.

But please do not be too sentimental about the "good old days." Many
people who only see the beautiful churches and the great works of art
which the Middle Ages have left behind grow quite eloquent when they
compare our own ugly civilisation with its hurry and its noise and the
evil smells of backfiring motor trucks with the cities of a thousand
years ago. But these mediaeval churches were invariably surrounded by
miserable hovels compared to which a modern tenement house stands
forth as a luxurious palace. It is true that the noble Lancelot and the
equally noble Parsifal, the pure young hero who went in search of the
Holy Grail, were not bothered by the odor of gasoline. But there were
other smells of the barnyard variety--odors of decaying refuse which
had been thrown into the street--of pig-sties surrounding the Bishop's
palace--of unwashed people who had inherited their coats and hats from
their grandfathers and who had never learned the blessing of soap. I
do not want to paint too unpleasant a picture. But when you read in the
ancient chronicles that the King of France, looking out of the windows
of his palace, fainted at the stench caused by the pigs rooting in the
streets of Paris, when an ancient manuscript recounts a few details of
an epidemic of the plague or of small-pox, then you begin to under-stand
that "progress" is something more than a catchword used by modern
advertising men.

No, the progress of the last six hundred years would not have been
possible without the existence of cities. I shall, therefore,