After all, the race of men has only just started. From the point of view of evolution, human beings are very young children indeed, babies, in fact, of a few months old. Scientists reckon that there has been life of some sort on the earth in the form of jelly-fish and that kind of creatures for about twelve hundred million years; but there have been men for only one million years, and there have been civilized men for about eight thousand years, at the outside. These figures are difficult to grasp; so let us scale them down. Suppose that we reckon the whole past of living creatures on the earth as one hundred years; then the whole past of man works out at about one month, and during that month there have been civilization for between seven and eight hours. So you see there has been little time to learn in, but there will be oceans of time in which to learn better. Taking man's civilized past at about seven or eight hours, we may estimate his future, that is to say, the whole period between now and when the sun grows too cold to maintain life any longer on the earth, at about one hundred thousand years. Thus, mankind is only at the beginning of its civilized life, and as I say, we must not expect too much. The past of man has been on the whole, a pretty beastly business, a business of fighting and bullying. We must not expect even civilized peoples not to have done these things. All we can ask is they will sometimes have done something else. This is what the story of mankind has on the whole been like. Even our own age has fought the two wars in history, in which millions of people were killed or mutilated. And while today, it is true that people do not fight and kill each other in the streets.
The Scale which the author uses for representing time is:
