108 THE EVOLUTION OF MATTER 



perhaps, but what is the use of it all? There is 

 a rumour, puffed judiciously in the press, that radium 

 is a cure for cancer, and immediately there is a 

 change. Stock exchanges get up radium, wild-cat 

 mining- schemes are floated, the public are invited to 

 get rich quickly, and every quack and charlatan, with 

 his radium ointment, radium pills, and radium waters, 

 refurbishes his familiar propaganda. The charitable 

 and benevolent, to whom the cry of suffering and the 

 dying ever make its irresistible appeal, raise the 

 funds to buy the radium. The genuine scientific 

 investigator can no longer afford to, and goes 

 without. 



Again the scene changes and the country is 

 spending nearly ^100 every second on the war. 

 Radium, like every other gift of science, is pressed 

 into the service of the war, as it is convenient for 

 illuminating the dials of watches and scientific 

 instruments at night, and the State, which before as 

 regards anything productive or creative did not 

 exist, must now afford anything for the purpose of 

 destruction. Men, materials, and capital must be 

 conscripted and organised to the last point for the 

 purposes of occasional international strife. 



But there is a struggle which is world-wide and 

 never-ending, the struggle against external nature 

 for control and mastery. The millions take no part 

 in it, are hardly aware that it goes on, and would be 

 surprised if they were told that their future fate and 

 prosperity depended upon it rather more intimately 

 than upon the issue of the doughty conflicts of the 

 parliamentarians some of them send up to West- 

 minster. Neither, again, would the mere alteration 

 in the character of their education, making it scientific 

 rather than classical, alone bring them salvation. 

 For this struggle is by duel rather than by armies, 

 and the issue of the duel the millions accept as blindly 



