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Anticipations Chapter 3 Part 1 · The H. G. Wells Library

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  Speaker 1: Chapter three A of anticipations. This is the LibriVox recording.
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  Speaker 1: All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more
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  Speaker 1: information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org. Anticipations
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  Speaker 1: by H. G. Wells, Chapter three A. Developing Social Elements.
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  Speaker 1: The mere differences in thickness of population and facility of
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  Speaker 1: movement that have been discussed thus far will involve consequences
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  Speaker 1: remarkable enough upon the facies of the social body. But
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  Speaker 1: there are certain still broader features of the social order
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  Speaker 1: of the coming times, less intimately related to transit, that
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  Speaker 1: it will be convenient to discuss at this stage. They
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  Speaker 1: are essentially outcomes of the enormous development of mechanism, which
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  Speaker 1: has been the cardinal feature of the nineteenth century. For
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  Speaker 1: this development, by altering the method and proportions of almost
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  Speaker 1: all human undertakings, has altered absolutely the groupings and character
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  Speaker 1: of the groups of human beings engaged upon them footnote.
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  Speaker 1: Even the characteristic conditions of writing books that least mechanical
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  Speaker 1: of pursuits have been profoundly affected by the typewriter end footnote.
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  Speaker 1: Throughout the world for forty centuries, the more highly developed
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  Speaker 1: societies have always presented under a considerable variety of superficial differences,
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  Speaker 1: certain features in common, always at the base of the edifice,
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  Speaker 1: supporting all, subordinate to all, and the most necessary of all,
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  Speaker 1: there has been the working cultivator, peasant, serf or slave.
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  Speaker 1: Save for a little water power, a little use of windmills,
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  Speaker 1: the traction of a horse or mule, this class has
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  Speaker 1: been the source of all the work upon which the
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  Speaker 1: community depends. And moreover, whatever labor town developments have demanded
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  Speaker 1: has been supplied by the muscle of its fecund ranks.
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  Speaker 1: It has been, in fact, and to some extent still is,
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  Speaker 1: the multitudinous living machinery of the old social order. It carried, cropped, tilled,
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  Speaker 1: built and made, and directing and sometimes owning this human machinery.
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  Speaker 1: There has always been a superior class, bound, usually by
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  Speaker 1: a point of honor, not to toil, often warlike, often equestrian,
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  Speaker 1: and sometimes cultivated. In England, this is the gentility. In
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  Speaker 1: most European countries, it is organized as a nobility. It
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  Speaker 1: is represented in the history of India by the twice
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  Speaker 1: born castes, and in China, the most philosophically conceived and
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  Speaker 1: the most stably organized social system. The old order, ever developed,
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  Speaker 1: it finds its equivalent in the members of a variously
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  Speaker 1: buttoned mandarin it, who ride not on horses but on
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  Speaker 1: a once adequate and still respectable erudition. These two primary
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  Speaker 1: classes may and do become, in many cases complicated by subdivisions.
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  Speaker 1: The peasant class may split into farmers and laborers. The
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  Speaker 1: gentlemen admit a series of grades and orders kings, dukes, earls,
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  Speaker 1: and the like, but the broad distinction remains intact, as
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  Speaker 1: though it was a distinction residing in the nature of things.
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  Speaker 1: Footnote to these two primary classes, the more complicated societies
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  Speaker 1: have added others. There is the priest, almost always in
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  Speaker 1: the social order of the pre railway period, and integral
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  Speaker 1: part a functional organ of the social body. And there
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  Speaker 1: are the lawyers and the physician, And in the towns,
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  Speaker 1: constituting indeed the towns there appear as an outgrowth of
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  Speaker 1: the toiling class, a little emancipated from the gentleman's direct control.
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  Speaker 1: The craftsman, the merchant, and the trading sailor essentially accessory classes,
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  Speaker 1: producers of and dealers in the accessories of life, and
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  Speaker 1: mitigating and clouding only very slightly that broad duality end footnote.
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  Speaker 1: From the very dawn of history until the first beginnings
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  Speaker 1: of mechanism in the eighteenth century, this simple scheme of
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  Speaker 1: orders was the universal organization of all but savage humanity,
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  Speaker 1: and the chief substance of history until these later years
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  Speaker 1: has been, in essence, the perpetual endeavor of specific social
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  Speaker 1: systems of this type to attain in every region the
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  Speaker 1: locally suitable, permanent form in face of those two inveterate
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  Speaker 1: enemies of human stability, innovation, and that secular increase in
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  Speaker 1: population that security permits. The imperfection of the means of
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  Speaker 1: communication rendered political unions of a greater area than that
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  Speaker 1: swept by a hundred mile radius highly unstable. It was
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  Speaker 1: a world of small states, lacks. Empires came and went.
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  Speaker 1: At the utmost, they were linking of practically autonomous states
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  Speaker 1: under a common pax. Wars were usually wars between kingdoms,
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  Speaker 1: conflicts of this local experiment and social organization with that.
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  Speaker 1: Through all the historical period, these two well defined classes
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  Speaker 1: of gentle and simple acted and reacted upon each other,
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  Speaker 1: every individual in each class, driven by that same will
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  Speaker 1: to live and do ue that imperative of self establishment
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  Speaker 1: and digression, that is the spirit of this world until
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  Speaker 1: the coming of gunpowder. The man on horseback, commonly with
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  Speaker 1: some sort of armor, was invincible in battle. In the open.
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  Speaker 1: Wherever the land lay wide and unbroken, and the great
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  Speaker 1: lines of trade did not fall there, the horseman was master,
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  Speaker 1: or the clerky man behind the horseman. Such a land
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  Speaker 1: was aristocratic and tended to form castes. The craftsmen sheltered
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  Speaker 1: under a patron and in guilds in a walled town,
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  Speaker 1: and the laborer was a serf. He was ruled over
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  Speaker 1: by his knight or by his creditor. In the end,
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  Speaker 1: it matters little how the gentleman began. But where the
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  Speaker 1: land became difficult by reason of mountain or forest, or
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  Speaker 1: where water greatly intersected it, the pikeman, or closer fighting
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  Speaker 1: swordsman or the bowman could hold his own, and a
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  Speaker 1: democratic flavor. A touch of repudiation was in the air.
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  Speaker 1: In such countries as Italy, Greece, the Alps, the Netherlands
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  Speaker 1: and Great Britain. The two forces of the old order,
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  Speaker 1: the aristocrat and the common man, were in a state
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  Speaker 1: of unstable equilibrium throughout the whole period of history. A
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  Speaker 1: slight change in the details of the conflict for existence
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  Speaker 1: could tilt the balance footnote slight that is, in comparison
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  Speaker 1: with nineteenth century changes, and footnote a weapon a little
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  Speaker 1: better adapted to one class than the other, or a
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  Speaker 1: slight widening of the educational gap worked out into historically
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  Speaker 1: imposing results to dynastic changes, class revolutions, and the passing
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  Speaker 1: of empires throughout it was essentially one phase of human organization.
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  Speaker 1: When one comes to examine the final result, it is
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  Speaker 1: astonishing to remark the small amount of essential change, of
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  Speaker 1: positively final and irreparable alteration in the conditions of the
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  Speaker 1: common life. Consider, for example, how entirely in sympathy was
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  Speaker 1: the close of the eighteenth century with the epoch of Horace,
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  Speaker 1: and how closely equivalent were the various social aspects of
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  Speaker 1: the two periods. The literature of Rome was living, reading
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  Speaker 1: in a sense that has suddenly passed away. It fitted
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  Speaker 1: all occasions. It conflicted with no essential facts in life.
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  Speaker 1: It was a commonplace of the thought of that time
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  Speaker 1: that all things recurred, all things circled back to their
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  Speaker 1: former seasons. There was nothing new under the sun. But
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  Speaker 1: now almost suddenly the circling has ceased, and we find
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  Speaker 1: ourselves breaking away. Correlated with the sudden development of mechanical
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  Speaker 1: forces that first began to be socially perceptible in the
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  Speaker 1: middle eighteenth century, has been the appearance of great masses
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  Speaker 1: of population having quite novel functions and relations to the
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  Speaker 1: social body. And together with this appearance, such as suppression, curtailment,
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  Speaker 1: and modification of the older classes, as to point to
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  Speaker 1: an entire disintegration of that system. The facies of the
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  Speaker 1: social fabric has changed, and, as I hope to make clear,
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  Speaker 1: is still changing in a direction from which without a
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  Speaker 1: total destruction and rebirth of that fabric there can never
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  Speaker 1: be any return. The most striking of the new classes
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  Speaker 1: to emerge is certainly the shareholding class, the owners of
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  Speaker 1: a sort of property new in the world's history. Before
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  Speaker 1: the eighteenth century, the only property of serious importance consisted
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  Speaker 1: of land and buildings. These were real estate. Beyond these
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  Speaker 1: things were live stock, serfs, and the furnishings of real estate.
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  Speaker 1: The surface aspects of real estate, so to speak, personal property, ships, weapons,
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  Speaker 1: and the semitic invention of money. All such property had
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  Speaker 1: to be actually held and administered by the owner. He
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  Speaker 1: was immediately in connection with it and responsible for it.
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  Speaker 1: He could leave it only precariously to a stuart and manager,
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  Speaker 1: and to convey the revenue of it to him at
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  Speaker 1: a distance was a difficult and costly proceeding. To prevent
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  Speaker 1: a constant social disturbance by lapsing and dividing property, and
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  Speaker 1: in the absence of any organized agency to receive lapsed
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  Speaker 1: property inheritance and preferably primogeniture, were of such manifest advantage
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  Speaker 1: that the old social organization always tended in the direction
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  Speaker 1: of these institutions. Such usury, as was practiced, relied entirely
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  Speaker 1: on the land and the anticipated agricultural produce of the land.
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  Speaker 1: But the usury and the sleeping partnerships of the joint
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  Speaker 1: stock company system, which took shape in the eighteenth and
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  Speaker 1: the earlier half of the nineteenth century, opened quite unprecedented
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  Speaker 1: uses for money and created a practically new sort of
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  Speaker 1: property and a new proprietor class. The peculiar novelty of
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  Speaker 1: this property is easily defined, given a sufficient sentiment of
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  Speaker 1: public honesty. Share property is property that can be owned
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  Speaker 1: at any distance, and that yields its revenue without thought
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  Speaker 1: or care on the part of its proprietor. It is
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  Speaker 1: indeed absolutely irresponsible property, a thing that no old world
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  Speaker 1: property ever was. But in spite of its widely different nature,
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  Speaker 1: the laws of inheritance that the social necessities of the
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  Speaker 1: old order of things established have been applied to this
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  Speaker 1: new species of possession without remark. It is indestructible, imperishable wealth,
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  Speaker 1: subject only to the mutations of value that economic changes
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  Speaker 1: bring about. Related in its character of absolute or responsibility
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  Speaker 1: to this shareholding class is a kindred class that has
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  Speaker 1: grown with the growth of the great towns, the people
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  Speaker 1: who live upon ground rents. There is every indication that
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  Speaker 1: this element of irresponsible, independent and wealthy people in the
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  Speaker 1: social body, people who feel the urgency of no exertion,
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  Speaker 1: the pressure of no specific positive duties, is still on
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  Speaker 1: the increase, and may still for a long time increasingly preponderate.
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  Speaker 1: It overshadows the responsible owner of real property or of
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  Speaker 1: real businesses altogether, and most of the old aristocrats, the
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  Speaker 1: old knightly and landholding people, have so to speak, converted
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  Speaker 1: themselves into members of this new class. It is a
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  Speaker 1: class with scarcely any specific characteristics beyond its defining one
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  Speaker 1: of the possession of property and all the potentialities property
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  Speaker 1: entails with a total lack of function with regard to
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  Speaker 1: that property. It is not even collected into a distinct mass.
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  Speaker 1: It graduates insensibly into every other class. It permeates society
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  Speaker 1: as threads and veins of gold permeate quartz. It includes
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  Speaker 1: the millionaire snob, the political minded plutocrat, the wealthy sensualist,
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  Speaker 1: open handed, religious phonetics, the charitable, the art, the magnificently dull,
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  Speaker 1: the great army of timid creatures who tremble through life
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  Speaker 1: on a safe bear sufficiency footnote. It included one remembers Schopenhauer,
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  Speaker 1: but as he later remarked upon occasion, not hegel end footnote. Travelers, hunters,
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  Speaker 1: minor poets, sporting enthusiasts, many of the officers in the
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  Speaker 1: British Army, and all sorts and conditions of amateurs. In
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  Speaker 1: a sense, it includes several modern royalties for the crown
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  Speaker 1: in several modern constitutional states. Is a corporation soul, and
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  Speaker 1: the monarch, the unique, unlimited, and so far as necessity goes,
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  Speaker 1: quite functionless shareholder. He may be a heavy eyed sensualist,
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  Speaker 1: a small minded leader of fashion, a rival to his
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  Speaker 1: servants in the gay science of etiquette, a frequenter of
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  Speaker 1: race courses and music halls, a literary or scientific quack,
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  Speaker 1: a devotee, an amateur, anything. The point is that his
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  Speaker 1: income and sustenance have no relation whatever to his activities.
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  Speaker 1: If he fancies it, or is urged to it by
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  Speaker 1: those who have influence over him, he may even be
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  Speaker 1: our king, but that is not compulsory, not essential, and
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  Speaker 1: there are practically no conditional restrictions whatever laid upon him.
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  Speaker 1: Those who belong to this shareholding class only partially, who
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  Speaker 1: partially depend upon dividends and partially upon activities, occur in
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  Speaker 1: every rank and order of the whole social body. The
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  Speaker 1: waiter one tips probably has a hundred or so in
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  Speaker 1: some remote company. The will of the eminent labor reformer
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  Speaker 1: reveals an admirably distributed series of investments. The bishop sells
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  Speaker 1: tea and digs coal, or at any rate, gets a
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  Speaker 1: profit from some unknown person's tea selling or coal digging,
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  Speaker 1: to ecount the direct recompense of his own modest corn treading. Indeed,
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  Speaker 1: above the laboring class, the number of individuals in the
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  Speaker 1: social body whose gross income is entirely the result of
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  Speaker 1: their social activities is very small. Previously in the world's history,
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  Speaker 1: saving a few quite exceptional aspects. The possession and retention
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  Speaker 1: of property was conditional upon activities of some sort, honest
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  Speaker 1: or dishonest, work force or fraud. But the shareholding ingredient
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  Speaker 1: of our new society, so far as its shareholding goes,
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  Speaker 1: has no need of strength or wisdom. The countless, untraceable
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  Speaker 1: owner of the modern world presents in a multitudinous form
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  Speaker 1: the image of a Merovingian king. The shareholder owns the
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  Speaker 1: world djure by the common recognition of the rights of
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  Speaker 1: property and the incumbency of knowledge. Management and toil fall
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  Speaker 1: entirely to others. He toils, not neither does he spin.
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  Speaker 1: He is mechanically released from the penalty of the fall.
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  Speaker 1: He reaps in a still sinful world, all the practical
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  Speaker 1: benefits of a millennium without any of its moral limitations.
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  Speaker 1: It will be well to glance at certain considerations which
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  Speaker 1: point to the by no means self evident proposition that
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  Speaker 1: this factor of irresponsible property is certain to be present
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  Speaker 1: in the social body one hundred years ahead. It has
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  Speaker 1: no doubt occurred to the reader that all the conditions
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  Speaker 1: of the shareholders being unfit him for cooperative action in
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  Speaker 1: defense of the interests of his class, since shareholders do
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  Speaker 1: nothing in common except receive and hope for dividends, Since
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  Speaker 1: they may be of any class, any culture, any disposition,
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  Speaker 1: or any level of capacity. Since there is nothing to
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  Speaker 1: make them read the same papers, gather in the same places,
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  Speaker 1: or feel any sort of sympathy with each other beyond
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  Speaker 1: the universal sympathy of man for man, they will, one
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  Speaker 1: may anticipate, be incapable of any concerted action to defend
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  Speaker 1: the income they draw from society against any resolute attack.
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  Speaker 1: Such crude and obvious denials of the essential principles of
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  Speaker 1: their existence, as the various socialistic bodies have proclaimed, have
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  Speaker 1: no doubt encountered a vast, unorganized negative opposition from them,
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  Speaker 1: but the subtle and varied attack of natural forces. They
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  Speaker 1: have neither the collective intelligence to recognize, nor the natural
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  Speaker 1: organization to resist. The shareholding body is altogether too chaotic
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  Speaker 1: and diffused for positive defense, and the question of the
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  Speaker 1: prolonged existence of this comparatively new social phenomenon, either in
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  Speaker 1: its present or some modified form, turns therefore entirely on
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  Speaker 1: the quasi natural laws of the social body. If they
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  Speaker 1: favor it, it will survive. When they do not, it
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  Speaker 1: will vanish as the mists of the morning before the sun,
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  Speaker 1: neglecting a few exceptional alder corporations, which indeed, in their
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  Speaker 1: essence are not usurus, but of unlimited liability. The shareholding
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  Speaker 1: body first appeared in its present character in the seventeenth century,
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  Speaker 1: and came to its full development in the middle nineteenth.
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  Speaker 1: Was its appearance then due only to the attainment of
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  Speaker 1: a certain necessary degree of public credit, or was it
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  Speaker 1: correlated with any other force? It seems in accordance with
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  Speaker 1: facts to relate it to another force, the development of mechanism.
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  Speaker 1: So far as certain representative aspects go hitherto, the only
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  Speaker 1: borrower had been the farmer. Then the exploring trader had
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  Speaker 1: found a world too wide for purely individual effort. And
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  Speaker 1: then suddenly the craftsmen of all sorts in the carriers
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  Speaker 1: discovered the need of the new great wholesale initially expensive
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  Speaker 1: appliances that invention was offering them. It was the development
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  Speaker 1: of mechanism that created the great bulk of modern shareholding.
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  Speaker 1: It took its present shape distinctively only with the appearance
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  Speaker 1: of the railways. So hitherto, necessary but subordinate craftsmen and
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  Speaker 1: merchant classes were to have new weapons, new powers they
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  Speaker 1: were to develop to a new importance, to a preponderance
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  Speaker 1: even after the social body. But before they could attain
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  Speaker 1: these weapons, before this new and novel wealth could be
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  Speaker 1: set up, it had to pay its footing in an
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  Speaker 1: apportioned world. It had to buy its right to disturb
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  Speaker 1: the established social order. The dividend of the shareholder was
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  Speaker 1: the tribute the new enterprise had to pay the old wealth.
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  Speaker 1: The share was the manumission money of machinery, And essentially
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  Speaker 1: the shareholder represents and will continue to represent, the responsible
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  Speaker 1: managing owner of a former state of affairs in process
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  Speaker 1: of supersession. If the great material developments of the nineteenth
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  Speaker 1: century had been final, if they had indeed constituted merely
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  Speaker 1: a revolution and not an absolute release from the fixed
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  Speaker 1: conditions about which human affairs circled, we might even now
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  Speaker 1: be settling accounts with our Merovingians, as the socialists desire.
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  Speaker 1: But these developments were not final, and one sees no
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  Speaker 1: hint as yet of any coming finality. Invention. Whi runs
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  Speaker 1: free and our state is under its dominion, the novel
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  Speaker 1: is continually struggling to establish itself at the relative or
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  Speaker 1: absolute expense of the old the statesman's conception of social
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  Speaker 1: organization is no longer stability but growth, and so long
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  Speaker 1: as material progress continues, this tribute must continue to be paid.
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  Speaker 1: So long as the stream of development flows, this necessary
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  Speaker 1: back eddy will endure. Even if we municipalize all sorts
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  Speaker 1: of undertakings. We shall not alter the essential facts. We
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  Speaker 1: shall only substitute for the shareholder, the corporation's stockholder. The
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  Speaker 1: figure of an eddy is particularly appropriate. Enterprises will come
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  Speaker 1: and go. The relative values of kinds of wealth will alter,
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  Speaker 1: old appliances. Old companies will serve their time and fall
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  Speaker 1: in value. Individuals will waste their substance, Individual families and
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  Speaker 1: groups will die out. Certain portions of the show share
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  Speaker 1: property of the world may be gathered by elaborate manipulation
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  Speaker 1: into a more or less limited number of hands. Conceivably,
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  Speaker 1: even families and groups will be taxed out by graduated
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  Speaker 1: legacy duties and specially apportioned income taxes. But for all
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  Speaker 1: such possible changes and modifications, the shareholding element will still
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  Speaker 1: endure so long as our present progressive and experimental state
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  Speaker 1: of society obtains, and the very diversity, laxity, and weakness
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  Speaker 1: of the general shareholding element, which will work to prevent
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  Speaker 1: its organizing itself in the interests of its property, or
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  Speaker 1: of evolving any distinctive traditions or positive characters, will obviously
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  Speaker 1: prevent its obstructing the continual appearance of new enterprises of
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  Speaker 1: new shareholders to replace the loss of its older constituents.
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  Speaker 1: At the opposite pole of the social scale to that
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  Speaker 1: about which shareholding is most apparent is a second, necessary
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  Speaker 1: and quite inevitable consequence of the sudden transition that has
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  Speaker 1: occurred from a very nearly static social organization to a
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  Speaker 1: violently progressive one. The second consequence of progress is the
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  Speaker 1: appearance of a great number of people without either property
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  Speaker 1: or any evident function in the social organism. This new
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  Speaker 1: ingredient is most apparent in the towns. It is frequently
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  Speaker 1: spoken of as the urban poor, but its characteristic traits
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  Speaker 1: are to be found also in the rural districts. For
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  Speaker 1: the most part, its individuals are either criminal, immoral, parasitic
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  Speaker 1: in more or less irregular ways upon the more successful classes,
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  Speaker 1: or laboring at something less than a regular, bare subsistence
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  Speaker 1: wage in a finely hopeless competition against machinery that is
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  Speaker 1: as yet not so cheap as their toil. It is,
• 21:49
  Speaker 1: to borrow a popular phrase, the submerged portion of the
• 21:53
  Speaker 1: social body, a leaderless, aimless multitude, a multitude of people
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: drifting down towards the abyss. Essentially, it consists of people
• 22:03
  Speaker 1: who have failed to catch on to the altered necessities
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: the development of mechanism has brought about. They are people
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: thrown out of employment by machinery, thrown out of employment
• 22:14
  Speaker 1: by the escape of industries along some newly opened line
• 22:17
  Speaker 1: of communication to some remote part of the world, or
• 22:21
  Speaker 1: born under circumstances that give them no opportunity of entering
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: the world of active work. Into this welter of machine
• 22:28
  Speaker 1: superseded toil, there topples the non adaptable residue of every
• 22:33
  Speaker 1: changing trade. Its members marry and are given in marriage,
• 22:37
  Speaker 1: and it is recruited by the spendthrifts, weaklings, and failures
• 22:41
  Speaker 1: of every superior class. Since this class was not apparent
• 22:45
  Speaker 1: in masses in the relatively static, relatively less eliminatory society
• 22:50
  Speaker 1: of former times, its appearance has given rise to a
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: belief that the least desirable section of the community has
• 22:56
  Speaker 1: become unprecedentedly prolific, that their is now going on a
• 23:01
  Speaker 1: rapid multiplication of the unfit. But sooner or later, as
• 23:06
  Speaker 1: every East End doctor knows, the ways of the social
• 23:09
  Speaker 1: abyss lead to death, the premature death of the individual,
• 23:13
  Speaker 1: or death through the death or infertility of the individual's
• 23:17
  Speaker 1: stunted offspring, or death through that extinction which moral perversion involves.
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: It is a recruited class, not a breeding multitude. Whatever
• 23:27
  Speaker 1: expedients may be resorted to to mitigate or conceal the
• 23:30
  Speaker 1: essential nature of this social element, it remains in its essence.
• 23:34
  Speaker 1: Wherever social progress is being made the contingent of death.
• 23:39
  Speaker 1: Humanity has set out in the direction of a more
• 23:41
  Speaker 1: complex and exacting organization, and until by a foresight to
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: me at least inconceivable, it can prevent the birth of
• 23:50
  Speaker 1: just all the inadaptable, useless, or merely unnecessary creatures in
• 23:54
  Speaker 1: each generation, there must needs continue to be in greater
• 23:57
  Speaker 1: or less amount this individually futiles struggle beneath the feet
• 24:02
  Speaker 1: of the race. Somewhere and in some form, there must
• 24:06
  Speaker 1: still persist these essentials that now take shape as the slum,
• 24:10
  Speaker 1: the prison, and the asylum all over the world. As
• 24:14
  Speaker 1: the railway network has spread in Chicago and New York,
• 24:18
  Speaker 1: as vividly as in London or Paris, the commencement of
• 24:21
  Speaker 1: the new movement has been marked at once by the
• 24:24
  Speaker 1: appearance of this bulky, irremovable excretion. The appearance of these
• 24:28
  Speaker 1: gallstones of vicious, helpless and pauper masses. There seems every
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: reason to suppose that this phenomenon of unemployed citizens who
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: are in fact unemployable will remain present as a class,
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: perishing individually and individually renewed. So long as civilization remains
• 24:47
  Speaker 1: progressive and experimental upon its present lines. Their drowning existences
• 24:52
  Speaker 1: may be utilized. Their crude hardship of their lot may
• 24:56
  Speaker 1: be concealed or mitigated. Footnote. Important factor in this mitigation,
• 25:02
  Speaker 1: a factor over which the humanely minded cannot too greatly rejoice,
• 25:06
  Speaker 1: will be the philanthropic amusements of the irresponsible wealthy. There
• 25:10
  Speaker 1: is a growing class of energetic people, organizers, secretaries, preachers
• 25:16
  Speaker 1: who cater to the philanthropic instinct, and who are for
• 25:19
  Speaker 1: all practical purposes employing a large and increasing section of suitable,
• 25:24
  Speaker 1: helpless people in supplying to their customers by means of
• 25:27
  Speaker 1: religious acquiescence and light moral reforms. That sense of well doing,
• 25:32
  Speaker 1: which is one of the least objectionable of the functionless
• 25:34
  Speaker 1: pleasures of life. The attempts to reinstate these failures by
• 25:38
  Speaker 1: means of subsidized industries will in the end of course,
• 25:42
  Speaker 1: merely serve to throw out of employment other just subsisting strugglers.
• 25:46
  Speaker 1: It will probably make little or no difference in the
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: net result of the process end footnote. They may react
• 25:53
  Speaker 1: upon the social fabric that is attempting to eliminate them
• 25:56
  Speaker 1: in very astounding ways, but their presence and their indiviation doom,
• 26:00
  Speaker 1: it seems to me, will be unavoidable at any rate
• 26:03
  Speaker 1: for many generations of men. They are an integral part
• 26:08
  Speaker 1: of this physiological process of mechanical progress, as inevitable in
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: the social body, as are waste matters and disintegrating cells
• 26:17
  Speaker 1: in the body of an active and healthy man. The
• 26:21
  Speaker 1: appearance of these two strange functionless elements, although the most
• 26:25
  Speaker 1: striking symptom of the new phase of progressive mechanical civilization
• 26:29
  Speaker 1: now beginning, is by no means the most essential change
• 26:32
  Speaker 1: in progress. These appearances involve also certain disappearances. I have
• 26:38
  Speaker 1: already indicated pretty clearly that the vast irregular development of
• 26:42
  Speaker 1: irresponsible wealthy people is swallowing up and assimilating more and
• 26:46
  Speaker 1: more the old class of administrative land owning gentlemen in
• 26:50
  Speaker 1: all their grades and degrees. The old upper class, as
• 26:54
  Speaker 1: a functional member of the state is being effaced. And
• 26:58
  Speaker 1: I have also suggested that the old low class, the
• 27:01
  Speaker 1: broad necessary base of the social pyramid, the uneducated, inadaptible
• 27:05
  Speaker 1: peasants and laborers, is with the development of toil saving machinery,
• 27:09
  Speaker 1: twindling and crumbling down bit by bit towards the abyss.
• 27:14
  Speaker 1: But side by side with these two processes is a
• 27:17
  Speaker 1: third process of still profoundest significance, and that is the
• 27:22
  Speaker 1: reconstruction and the vast proliferation of what constituted the middle
• 27:26
  Speaker 1: class of the old order. It is now indeed no
• 27:30
  Speaker 1: longer a middle class at all. Rather, all the definite
• 27:33
  Speaker 1: classes and the old scheme of functional precedence have melted
• 27:37
  Speaker 1: and mingled. Footnote. I reserve any consideration of the special
• 27:41
  Speaker 1: case of the priest and footnote. And in the molten
• 27:45
  Speaker 1: mass there has appeared a vast, intricate confusion of different
• 27:49
  Speaker 1: sorts of people, some sailing about upon floating masses of
• 27:53
  Speaker 1: irresponsible property, some buoyed by smaller fragments, some clinging desperately
• 27:58
  Speaker 1: enough to insignificant atoms, a great and varied multitude swimming
• 28:03
  Speaker 1: successfully without aid or with an amount of aid that
• 28:06
  Speaker 1: is negligible in relation to their own efforts, and an
• 28:09
  Speaker 1: equally varied multitude of less capable ones clinging to the swimmers,
• 28:13
  Speaker 1: clinging to the floating rich, or clutching empty handed and
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: thrust and sinking down. This is the typical aspect of
• 28:20
  Speaker 1: the modern community. It will serve as a general description
• 28:24
  Speaker 1: of either the United States or any Western European state.
• 28:27
  Speaker 1: And the day is not far distant when the extension
• 28:30
  Speaker 1: of means of communication and of the shareholding method of
• 28:33
  Speaker 1: conducting affairs will make it applicable to the whole world,
• 28:37
  Speaker 1: save possibly in a few islands and inaccessible places. And
• 28:41
  Speaker 1: regardless of color or creed, this process of deliquescence seems
• 28:46
  Speaker 1: destined to spread in a great diversity of tongues, in
• 28:50
  Speaker 1: the phases of a number of conflicting moral and theological traditions,
• 28:54
  Speaker 1: in the varying tones of contrasting racial temperaments. The grand
• 28:58
  Speaker 1: children of black and white and red and brown will
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: be seeking more or less consciously to express themselves in
• 29:05
  Speaker 1: relation to these new and unusual social conditions. But the
• 29:10
  Speaker 1: change itself is no longer amenable to their interpretations. The
• 29:14
  Speaker 1: world wide spreading of swift communication, the obliteration of town
• 29:18
  Speaker 1: and country, the deliquescence of the local social order, have
• 29:21
  Speaker 1: an air of being processes as uncontrollable by such collective
• 29:25
  Speaker 1: intelligence as men can at present command, and as indifferent
• 29:29
  Speaker 1: to his local peculiarities and prejudices as the movements of
• 29:34
  Speaker 1: winds and tides. End of Chapter three, A recording by
• 29:40
  Speaker 1: John Trevivick