The great mechanical inventions of the nineteenth century have given us an opportunity of choosing for ourselves our way of living such as men have never had before. Up to our own time the vast majority of mankind have had enough to do to keep themselves alive, and to satisfy the blind instinct which impels them to hand on life to another generation. An effective choice has only been given to a tiny class of hereditary property owners, or a few organisers of other men's labour. Even when, as in ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia, nature offered whole populations three hundred free days in the year if they would devote two months to ploughing and harvest, all but a fraction still spent themselves in unwilling toil, building tombs or palaces, or equipping armies, for a native monarch or a foreign conqueror. The monarch could choose his life, but his choice was poor enough. 'There is,' says Aristotle, 'a way of living so brutish that it is only worth notice because many of those who can live any life they like make no better choice than did Sardanapalus.' The Greek thinkers started modern civilisation, because they insisted that the trading populations of their walled cities should force themselves to think out an answer to the question, what kind of life is good. 'The origin of the city-state,' says Aristotle, 'is that it enables us to live; its justification is that it enables us to live well.' Before the war, there were in London and New York, and Berlin, thousands of rich men and women as free to choose their way of life as was Sardanapalus, and as dissatisfied with their own choice. Many of the sons and daughters of the owners of railways and coal mines and rubber plantations were 'fed up' with motoring or bridge, or even with the hunting and fishing which meant a frank resumption of palaeolithic life without the spur of palaeolithic hunger. But my own work brought me into contact with an unprivileged class, whose degree of freedom was the special product of modern industrial civilisation, and on whose use of their freedom the future of civilisation may depend. A clever young mechanic, at the age when the Wanderjahre of the medieval craftsman used to begin, would come home after tending a 'speeded up' machine from 8 A.M., with an hour's interval, till 5 P.M. At 6 P.M. he had finished his tea in the crowded living-room of his mother's house, and was 'free' to do what he liked. That evening, perhaps, his whole being tingled with half-conscious desires for love, and adventure, and knowledge, and achievement. On another day he might have gone to a billiard match at his club, or have hung round the corner for a girl who smiled at him as he left the factory, or might have sat on his bed and ground at a chapter of Marx or Hobson. But this evening he saw his life as a whole. The way of living that had been implied in the religious lessons at school seemed strangely irrelevant; but still he felt humble, and kind, and anxious for guidance.