Someone lately asked me by what image I would represent the age that began with the use of steam and ended with the World War. I was not sure that any age had actually ended then, but an image did occur to me. It came from the story of the fisherman in the _Thousand Nights and a Night_ who let the Jinni out of the jar and then found him fierce and uncontrollable. But upon second thought I saw that the image was not accurate: the fisherman by using his wits did persuade the spirit back into his copper prison and made a bargain with him which saved the man from death. Then another image occurred to me. It was that of a crew of pirates who chanced upon an unexpected island and there found such incalculable treasure that they went mad with their good fortune, raged up and down the island, extended their fury to a whole archipelago, and at last wound up in a debauch of robbery and slaughter. But neither did this image satisfy me: the people of the last age were not criminals to start with; they were as virtuous as those of any other age on—or not on—record. A better image would be that of some tribe of anthropoids who, after long subsisting on a more or less difficult plane of life, suddenly got hold of a hundred tricks and secrets which gave them power over earth, air, fire, and water, endowing them with human riches without human discipline. And yet it is less than fair to make this distinction between men and their lagging cousins of the tree-tops. Not monkeys too abruptly promoted to be men but men come too abruptly into wealth—that is the analogy. Thinking in terms of the long history of the race, look what happened. Never before, to put it broadly, had men been warm enough except in those regions of the earth where the sun warmed them; now they dug up mountains of coal and drew off rivers of oil and fashioned whole atmospheres of gas for fuel; and with these, besides warming themselves, they made such tools and weapons as had not even been dreamed of. Never before, still to put it broadly, had men had food enough; now they discovered how to coax unprecedented crops out of the soil and how to breed new armies of beasts to be devoured and how to catch what the depths of forests and oceans had hitherto denied them and how to create all sorts of novel foods by manufacture. Never before had men, except in dangerous, communal migrations, moved much from their native places; now they made vehicles and ships to go like the wind and in time took to the wind itself for their trafficking until restless tides of human life flowed here and there over the surface of the earth as if men and nations had no such things as homes. Long naked, they covered themselves with preposterous garments and strutted up and down; long hungry, they stuffed their bellies till they were sick with surfeit; long home-bound, they ran wild till they were lost.