The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1914-10-23

1t1cs, think 1t falls to you to bury them There? No, dent put them near the well. People will have to drink from that well Bury them over there, some way off, in the field"
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 CHAPTER XII.
 The New Phase.
 ~NHE task that lay before the as-
 sembly of Brissago, viewed, as
 we may view 1t now, from the
 clarifying standpoint: Of things accomplished, was in its broad issues simple one. Essentially it was to place social organization upon the new footing that the swift, accelerated ad- vance of human knoWIedga had rem dered necessary. The council was gathered together with the haste of "a salvage expedition, and it was con- fronted with wreckage, but the wreck age was irreparabIe wreckage, and the only possibilities of the case were ei-l ther the relapse of mankind to the az Ticultural barbarism from which it had emerged so painfully or the acceptance of achieved science as the basis of a new social order. The old tendencies of human nature, suspicion. jealousy, partfcularism and belIigerency were i'm compatible with the monstrous destruc- tive power of the new appliances the inhuman logic of science had produced The equilibrium could be restored only by civilization destroying itself down to a level at which modern apparatus could no longer be produced or by hu- man nature adapting itself and it's in atitutions to the new conditions It was for the latter alternative that the assembly existed
 Sooner or later this choice would have confronted mankind The sudden development of atomic science did but precfpitate and render rapid and dra- matfc clash between the new and the customary that had been gathering since the first flint was clipped or the first fire built together From the day when man conttived hinaself tool and suffered another male to draw near him he eeased to be altogether thing of instinct and untroubIed convictions. From that day forth widening breach can be traced between his egotistical passions and the social need Slowly he adapted himself to the life of the homestead and his passionate Impulses Widened out to the demands of the clan and the tribe. But widen though his impulses might the latent hunter and wanderer and wonderer in his imagination outstripped their develop nent. He was never quite subdued to the soil nor quite tanned to the home. Everywhere it needed teaching and the priest to keep him within the bounds of the p1o%gh life and the beast tend- ] Ing Slowly vast system of tradi- tfonaI imperatives supexposed itself upon his instincts, imperatives that were admirably fitted to make him that culHv ator, that cattle hinder, who was for twice ten thousand years the nor nal man.
 And, unpremediated, undesfred out of the accumufatfons of his tflling came civilization. Civilization was the agricultural surplus. It appeared as trade and tracks and roads, it pushed boats out upon the rivers and presently invaded the seas, and within it's px1mI- tive courts, within temples grown rfch and leisureIy and amidst the gathering medley of the seaport towns rose spec u1ation and philosophy and science and the beginning of the new order that has at last established itself as human life. Slowly at first as we traced it and then with an accumulating velocity the new powers were fabricated. Man as a whole did not seek them nor de sire them; they were thrust into his hand. For time men took up and used these new things and the new powers inadvertently as they came to hinn,s recking nothing Of the conse- quences. For endless generations change led him very gently. But when he had been led far enough change quickened the pace. It was with a series of shocks that he realized at last that he was living the old life less and less and new life more and more.
 Already before the release of atomic way of living and the new were in tense They were far intenser than they had been even at the collapse of the Roman imperial system. On the one hand was the ancient life of the family and the small community and the petty industry: on the other was 3 new life on larger scale with remoter horizons and strange sense of pur. pose. Already it was growing clear that men must live on one side or the other One could not have little trades people and syndicated businesses in the same market, sleeping carters and motor trolleys on the same road, bows and arrows and aeroplane sharpshoot- CTS in the same army, or illiterate peas ant industries and power driven fac tories in the same world And st1 less was it possible that one could have the ideas and ambitions and greed and Jealousy of peasants equipped with the vast appliances of the new age. Il there had been no atomic bombs tc bring together most of the directing in telligence of the world to that hast5 conference at Brissago there would stil i