This however, does not cause you the least uneasiness. You merely take your watch from your pocket and look expectantly up the line. Perhaps a minute before the train is due, you hear a distant whistle, then the approaching roar of wheels upon the rails, and, just as the watch-hand reaches the proper moment, the train itself whirls round the curve and draws up to the station, exactly on time. As you proceed upon your way, you notice how other people at other stations are also meeting their schedules and conserving their time. You see the conductor glance at his watch as he gives the engineer the starting-signal. You realize that the whole transportation system is merely an enormous piece of clockwork and that it, in turn, is a part of the vaster clockwork of modern civilization. Turn where you will, there is nothing that you can do and nothing that you can use which is not dependent upon the ticking of clockwork. The locomotive which pulls your train, the cars in which you ride, the rails over which you pass, all of these are products of factories, but the factories are run upon the time-basis; there is no other way in which they could be run. The workmen in these factories leave their records upon time-clocks when they come and when they go. If the workmen were not there at the same time, the work could not be done, since most of modern work depends upon the ability of people to work together at the same task. Even if one man were late, it might lose time for many. The clothes that you wear come from other factories where other workmen have time-clocks and watches. The buildings that you see from the windows were put up on the time-basis and were paid for according to the movement of the hands upon watch dials. [Illustration: TIME PIECES VITAL TO INDUSTRY _Without the ability to record time, and, therefore, to control it, the complex web of human activity would become hopelessly tangled._] You buy a newspaper, making sure that you are getting the latest edition, and it is at once as though you looked into a great mirror reflecting the activities of all the world, but all of the dispatches bear a date-line, and many of them are also marked with the hour. Before the days of newspapers, people felt themselves to be a part of the lives of their own immediate neighborhood and knew only vaguely of what went on at a distance, but now each day one feels himself to be a part of the great human family and can sometimes make his plans with reference to things that may be occurring thousands of miles away. But the newspaper itself is a product of clockwork; there is perhaps no institution whose workers keep closer track of the passage of the minutes. In view of all these things, does it seem too much to claim that if all the timepieces in existence were destroyed and men were given no other means for telling time, civilization would swiftly drop to pieces and man would find himself traveling backward to the conditions of the caveman?