suddenly taken wing-was the bright side of the opening phase of the new epoch in human history. Beneath that brightness was a gathering darkness, a deepening dismay. If there was a vast development of production, there was also a huge destruction of values. These glaring factories. These glaring factories working night and day, these glittering new vehicles swinging noiselessly along the roads, these flights of dragon-flies that soared and circled in the air, were indeed no more than the brightnesses of lamps and fires that gleam out when the world sinks toward twilight and the night. Between these high lights accumulated disaster, social catastrophe. The coal mines were manifestly doomed to closure at no very distant date; the vast amount of capital invested in oil was becoming unsalable; millions of coal-miners, steelworkers upon the old lines, vast swarms of unskilled or under-skilled laborers in innumerable occupations, were being flung out of employment by the superior efficiency of the new machinery; the rapid fall in the cost of transit was destroying high land values at every center of population; the value of existing house property had become problematical; gold was undergoing headlong depreciation; all the securities upon which the credit of the world rested were slipping and sliding; banks were tottering; the stock-exchanges were scenes of feverish panic. This was the reverse of the spectacle, these were the black and monstrous underconsequences of the Leap into the Air.

In the year 1955 the suicide rate for the United States of America quadrupled any previous record. There was also an enormous increase in violent crime throughout the world. The thing had come upon an unprepared humanity; it seemed as though human society was to be smashed by its own magnificent gains.

For there had been no foresight of these things. There had been no attempt anywhere even to compute the probable dislocations this flood of inexpensive energy would produce in human affairs. The world in these days was not really governed at all in the sense in which govern

ment came to be understood in subsequent years.

Government was a treaty, not a design; it was forensic, conservative, disputatious, unseeing, unthinking, uncreative. Throughout the world, except where the vestiges of absolutism still sheltered the court favorite and the trusted servant, it was in the hands of the predominant caste of lawyers, who had an enormous advantage in being the only trained caste. Their professional education, and every circumstance in the manipulation of the fantastically naïve electoral methods by which they clambered to power, conspired to keep them contemptuous of facts, conscientiously unimaginative, alert to claim and seize advantages, and suspicious of every generosity.

The world was so little governed that with the very coming of plenty, in the full tide of an incalculable abundance, when everything necessary to satisfy human needs and everything necessary to realize such will and purpose as existed then in human hearts was already at hand, one has still to tell of hardship, famine, anger, confusion, conflict, and incoherent suffering. There was no scheme for the distribution of this vast new wealth that had come at last within the reach of men; there was no clear conception that any such distribution was possible. As one attempts a comprehensive view of those opening years of the new age, as one measures it against the latent achievement that later years have demonstrated, one begins to measure the blindness, the narrowness, the insensate, unimaginative individualism of the pre-atomic time. Under this tremendous dawn of power and freedom, under a sky ablaze with promise, in the very presence of science standing like some bountiful goddess over all the squat darknesses of human life, holding patiently in her strong arms, until men chose to take them, security, plenty, the solution of riddles, the key of the bravest adventuresin her very presence, and with the earnest of her gifts in court, the world was to see the black shadow of war sweeping down from the skies.