This is the sense of the future I want to talk about, at first hand, as a scientist. I am distressed to see how many people today are afraid of the future and of science together. I believe that these fears are mistaken. They seem to me to spring from a misunderstanding of the methods of science and a gloom about what it has done. We sit under the shadow of the nine o'clock news, nursing our sense of doom. We think ourselves worse off than our forefathersa hundred and seventy years ago, who were at war with Napoleon for a generation. But a hundred and seventy years ago, the working week was eighty hours for children. Cholera was more common in England than flu. The country could barely support ten million people, and not a million of them could read. You know how all this has been changed,and don't let anyone tell youthat nothing has been gained but comfort. Think of the gain in life and health alone: a population which has topped fifty millions, the infant death rate cut by 80 or 90 percent, and the span of life enlarged by at least twenty-five years. The sewer and the fertilizer have done that, and the linotype and the X-ray tube. They have been real liberators. Every machine has been a liberator. They have freed us from drudgery and disease and ignorance and from the misery Hogarth painted that could forget itself only in the stupor of drink.