126 THE SHADOW OF THE WORLD’S FUTURE 
future movements will be, nor what part Man is to 
play in the world-future. 
Thinking men have at last, however, apparently 
reached more sanity in their estimate of their place in 
Nature, and in regard to their status as denizens of 
the earth, than characterised them in the past. The 
ablest of them, endowed with intellectual powers of a 
high order and endowed also with imaginations of 
some reach, with the genius of invention, and with 
the ability to create — within limits — new world- 
situations, are able to envisage to some extent the 
problems of their own future. But the ordinary 
demands of life are pressing, and one is apt to forget 
those issues, at least, that are dated to arrive later 
than the immediate future. To those who have 
vision, however, comes the call of duty, viz., that 
of shaping the interests of their country and of the 
world in respect of the tremendous problems that 
loom large in the future life of humanity. 
But Man lives not only in a physical but also in a 
psychic atmosphere, created by the mass around him. 
He can no more escape this than it can escape him. 
And if the mass fail to react to great issues when they 
are revealed, it is merely so much evidence that Nature 
has a different end in view from that which presents 
itself to his mind. 
In August and September 1927, a well-attended 
international conference met in Geneva, under the 
presidency of Sir Bernard Mallet, to discuss the prob- 
lem of the world’s future in respect of population. 
This, at any rate, discloses that experts have awakened 
to the fact that all is not well with the world in respect 
of its inhabitants, and their future. It is a hopeful 
sign. But there is no adequate world-reaction yet to 
this important movement. It may be the beginning 
of the solution of some of the greater difficulties of the 
world’s future, but if it is to achieve that measure of