Of What Avail Is Material Advance? xiii 



standing of the essentials of human intercourse 

 revealed by the men capable of these modern 

 mechanical wonders (which would have seemed 

 miraculous to the ancient world) is not very much 

 better than that of the desert tribesmen who gave 

 us our proverbs and our psalms, and whose 

 mechanical conquest of nature was hardly more 

 advanced than that of the men to whom the 

 manufacture of a stone axe represented the highest 

 achievement of human engineering? 



Now, all our advance on the material side 

 threatens to be of no avail in the really vital and 

 fundamental things that touch mankind, because 

 our understanding of the natiire of human associa- 

 tions has not kept pace with our understanding of 

 matter and its control. Of what avail is our 

 immense increase in wealth production if we do 

 not know how to distribute it in the order of our 

 most vital needs — if the total net result of our 

 discovery and achievements is to give still more to 

 those who have already too much and to render 

 the underworld still more dependent, their lives 

 still more precarious? What should we say, asks 

 Shaw, of the starving man who, on being given a 

 dollar, forthwith spends it all on a bottle of scent 

 for his handkerchief? Yet that is what the modern 

 world does, and it is, we are told, incapable of 

 doing anything else, so intellectually bankrupt 

 are we to assume it. So immense is the failure 

 on this side that responsible students of the 

 comparative condition of men seriously question 



