He knew it then only as
a strange thing utterly beyond his control, a flare on the crest of the
volcano, a red destruction that poured through the forest. So it is that
we know radio-activity to-day. This--this is the dawn of a new day in
human living. At the climax of that civilisation which had its beginning
in the hammered flint and the fire-stick of the savage, just when it
is becoming apparent that our ever-increasing needs cannot be borne
indefinitely by our present sources of energy, we discover suddenly the
possibility of an entirely new civilisation. The energy we need for our
very existence, and with which Nature supplies us still so grudgingly,
is in reality locked up in inconceivable quantities all about us. We
cannot pick that lock at present, but----'
He paused. His voice sank so that everybody strained a little to hear
him.
'----we will.'
He put up that lean finger again, his solitary gesture.
'And then,' he said. . . .
'Then that perpetual struggle for existence, that perpetual struggle to
live on the bare surplus of Nature's energies will cease to be the lot
of Man. Man will step from the pinnacle of this civilisation to the
beginning of the next. I have no eloquence, ladies and gentlemen, to
express the vision of man's material destiny that opens out before me.
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