10 THE PATH OF SCIENCE 



lence and famine. But to these the race has become inured, 

 and the hope of this period appeared to be based on reason- 

 able foresight. Their troubles were mostly in the present; 

 their future seemed remarkably secure. 



Now the outlook has changed. We still have our pres- 

 ent troubles, and to them has been added grave anxiety 

 about the future, an anxiety which is most marked among 

 thoughtful men. For there is reason to doubt whether we 

 shall be able to hand on to our children unimpaired the 

 great social structure which we received from our fore- 

 fathers. 



At the time that Cabot wrote this, he was not thinking 

 directly of the great threat that was developing in Central 

 Europe and that in 1939 broke on the world in a tempest of 

 fire and steel. Instead, as he said in his commencement ad- 

 dress to Juniata College on June 1, 1936,* he felt that the 

 danglers that threaten us are internal and arise from the loss 

 of the fundamental agreements upon which the life of our 

 society is based. Social disintegration appeared to him to be 

 foreshadowed in the weakening of family life, the breakdown 

 of social conventions, and especially the decay of religion. 

 These changes arise from the fluidity and increase of wealth 

 and from the great mobility of the population, so that scarcely 

 any families live in the old homestead and few live many 

 years in the same place. People no longer feel that they 

 belong to a definite group, and without such a feeling so- 

 cieties are unlikely to persist. 



It is by no means the first time in the history of the world 

 that rapid changes have occurred, both in relation to the 

 material control that man has over his environment and also 

 in relation to the economic and social structure of society. 

 Frequently these changes, accompanied by great mass move- 

 ments of peoples, have resulted in the destruction of cities 

 and the erection of new empires on the ashes of the old. 

 Between the fourteenth and the twelfth centuries b.c, such 

 a ereat chano^e occurred and it resulted in the destruction of 

 the oldest stable empires of which we have any record. The 



* Philip Cabot, Addresses 1935-1941, Cambridge, Mass., 1942. 



