S o SCIENCE REMAKING THE WORLD 



adays to live on white bread and iced water is not re- 

 garded as wicked indulgence. Nobody objects to it ex- 

 cept those who think that brown bread and tepid water 

 are better for the health. 



This does not prove that Juvenal and such satirists 

 were wrong. On the contrary they were doubtless 

 right, for the aristocrat who ate white bread and drank 

 cold drinks when nobody else in the city could afford 

 them, did feel a selfish satisfaction at his superiority 

 and so it was demoralizing to him. But when the roller 

 mill and the refrigerating machine brought these table 

 delicacies to the level of common life they became quite 

 harmless. 



The way to make a luxury innocuous is to make 

 enough of it to go around. When it becomes cheap it 

 ceases to be extravagant, and when it becomes common 

 it ceases to be exclusive, and therefore it is no longer a 

 menace to morality. Isaiah was doubtless justified in 

 denouncing the daughters of Zion for their "changeable 

 suits of apparel," but I do not think he would say the 

 same now when a package of dye soap can be bought 

 for ten cents. For the ladies who change the colour of 

 their apparel by the use of such coal-tar products do not> 

 I am sure, feel sinfully set up about it. 



The coal-tar products form a new factor in our civili- 

 zation. Not long ago, chemists celebrated the fiftieth 

 anniversary of the day when a London schoolboy, wash- 

 ing up his glassware after an experiment that had failed, 

 found that the black sticky stuff in his beaker kept 

 colouring the wash water purplish. Like Columbus 

 and Saul, young Perkin had failed to find what he was 



