Page 123 - English Class 07

necessary to our civilisation as the air we breathe is to us; and we have grown so used to

them that we do not notice them any more than we notice the air.
We are also largely free from the fear of pain. People still fall ill, but since the use of

anesthetics became common, illness is no longer the terrible thing it used to be. And people
are ill much less often. To be healthy is not to be civilised but unless you have good health,
you cannot enjoy anything or achieve anything. There have, it is true, been great men who
have been invalids , but their work was done in spite of their ill-health and, good as it was, it

would have been better had they been well. Not only men and women enjoy better health,
but also they live longer than they ever did before.

Thirdly, our civilisation is more secure
than any that have gone before it. This is anaesthetics : substances that creates a painless state
invalids : people suffering from a long sickness
because it is much widely spread. Most
savagery : wild behaviour
of the previous civilisations known to

history came to an end because vigorous but uncivilised people broke in upon them and
destroyed them. This was fate of Babylon and Assyria; it happened over and over again in
India and China; it brought about the end of Greece and the fall of Rome.

Now, whatever the dangers which threaten our civilisation, and they are many, it seems
likely to escape this one. Previous civilisations were like oasis in a surrounding desert of
savagery. Sooner or later, the desert closed in and the oasis was no more. But, today it is

the oasis, which is spreading over the desert.
The world has now for the first time a chance of becoming a single whole, a unity. So far

as buying and selling and the exchange of goods are concerned, it is a unity already. The
things in a grocer’s shop, for instance, are from several countries. There are oranges from
Brazil, dates from Africa, rice from India and tea from China. No king, not even Solomon in
all his glory, could draw no such rich stores of varied products as the housewife who does

her shopping a the grocer’s. The fact that these things come to us from all over the world
means that for the first time the world is becoming a single place, instead of a lot of
separate places shut off from one another.

II

In democratic countries, all are equal before the law and have a voice in deciding how
and by whom they shall be governed. But the sharing-out of money, which means the
sharing-out of food and clothing and houses and books and so on is still very unfair. While
some people live in luxury, many have not even enough to eat, drink and wear. Even in the
finest of the world’s cities thousands of people live in dreadful surroundings. They are many

families of five or six persons who live in single room. In this room, they sleep and dress and
wash and eat their meals; in this same room they are born and in this same room they die.

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