But first a word about this friend. He is a finished product of an older civilization than that of New York. Whenever I walk with him in what Mr. Henry James carefully describes as "the Fifth Avenue," I feel as George Warrington did when he walked with Pendennis: "I feel as if I had a flower in my button-hole." His life moves entirely among the most precious objects of art and literature, among masterpieces of sculpture, painting, printing, book-binding, and what not. And withal he is very much alive and in touch with the world in which we live. After this introduction I shall let him rail at our wonderful civilization. "Invention is the curse of the world. With our machinery and efficiency we are speeded up so that life has been spoiled. I wonder who made the first invention." That led to a pretty discussion. After dealing with the subject back and forth, we decided that the most guilty man the world had ever known was the man who invented the first wheel--who discovered that something round could be made to revolve. That discovery was the starting-point of all our modern machinery and destructive speed. Take away the wheel and the world would come to a standstill. I joined him in reviling that far-off, long-ago inventor. Then we followed the first wheel--was it perhaps a potter's wheel?--and followed its deadly evolution. The oldest wheels recorded in art are the wheels of chariots--war chariots, of course. There you see the earliest tendency of the war spirit that culminated in our great war of machinery. The warrior used the wheel to make a chariot to give him an advantage over his enemies. The development of the wheel has been involved with war from the chariot wheel to the whirling propellers of aeroplanes. This line of thought led us to realize that war is the great stimulator of invention. Such inventions as the aeroplane were perfected more completely in the four years of war than they would have been in centuries of peace. We found that it would be easy to hold a brief for war as the force that has been perfecting our civilizations of many inventions. (Solomon said, "Man was born upright, but he has sought out many inventions.") But what does it profit us if the highest use we make of our inventions is to increase our efficiency in battle? If we invent long enough and cleverly enough, we may yet start a war in which we will destroy the human race. That awful possibility is the present preoccupation of scientific research. We are told that the next advance of science may be the discovery of how to release atomic energy. Molecular energy, brought under control through the unstable equilibrium of certain artificial compounds, has given us the gun, the cannon, the bomb, the mine, and all the other infernal masterpieces of high explosives. What would atomic energy give us?