^ New Light on the Tragedy of Civilisation 



quite useless. No epoch in the world's history can be 

 set in comparison with ours in so far as it has becMi the 

 witness, in the course of a few decades, of almost daily 

 progress and improvement in connection with industry, 

 culture, and the whole field of human knowledge. And, 

 moreover, no epoch has been so penetrated with the 

 great thoughts of progressive humanity. The continual 

 employment — in ways that are ever more adroit, ever 

 more complex — of all the resources offered by nature to 

 man, seems at the same time to blind him to certain 

 grave misdeeds that he is actually perpetrating every day. 

 These great crimes against the harmony and order with 

 which nature surrounds us — crimes that it is not easy to 

 make any amends for — are the disfigurement and poisoning 

 of watercourses, the pollution of the air, the laying waste 

 of a portion of the plant world (namely, the forests), and 

 the extinction of some of the animals that live with us. 



W^e do not shrink from the most reck/ess exploitation 

 of those forests that have come down to us from the 

 primeval past — the vast stores of coal buried deep in the 

 bosom of the earth. The expert can now calculate with 

 certainty that in a few hundred, at the very farthest in a 

 thousand, years these stores will be exhausted. When it 

 comes to this, the triumphant progress of industrial science 

 will no doubt give us some substitute, perhaps even some- 

 thing better ; but no technical knowledge, no science, can 

 ever give us back anew those highly developed organisms 

 of the plant and animal world which man to-day is reck- 

 lessly sweeping out of the list of living things. They 

 cannot restore to us the green woods and their animal life. 



Ill 



