Excerpt from The Unity of the Free World Our subject, the unity of the free world, is one we can approach either from the angle of unity, or the angle of disunity. Both characteristics are, I think, apparent in our coalition of free nations in their attempt to solve the problems of living together in this insanely dangerous world. Yet, there is a unity which we can take as our starting point which embraces more than the free world. It embraces all mankind. Whether we like it or not, something is happening to the whole human species as a common experience something in which we all share. This is the transformation of our institutions, our ideas and our working economics from the old world of tradition, subsistence agriculture, marginal trade, and auto cratic leadership over to the modern society which is based upon science, upon technology, upon political equality, upon the application of reason to wider and wider areas of life, to the presentation of everything under the hard light of reason and interest. This tremendous change in the way of looking at the world began, I suppose, about two or three hundred years ago in the Western world, and now nobody can escape it. Not even the most primitive village in the Congo or the most remote tribal group in the Andes can get away from the fact that man is transforming himself according to a new pat tern. In fact, I think if you want to understand any comparable shift you probably have to go back over millennia to the time when mankind gave up fishing and hunting as the main occupation of life and turned to the development of settled agriculture and city life, and built up the great archaic civilizations on this new basis. I need hardly say the whole proc ess took a very long time. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.