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with warfare and police espionage,
have been developed, but experiment and invention have largely stopped, and
the ravages of the atomic war of the nineteen-fifties have never been fully
repaired. Nevertheless the dangers inherent in the machine are still there.
From the moment when the machine first made its appearance it was clear to
all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a
great extent for human inequality, had disappeared. If the machine were
used deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy, and
disease could be eliminated within a few generations. And in fact, without
being used for any such purpose, but by a sort of automatic process -- by
producing wealth which it was sometimes impossible not to distribute -- the
machine did raise the living standards of the average humand being very
greatly over a period of about fifty years at the end of the nineteenth and
the beginning of the twentieth centuries.
But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened
the destruction -- indeed, in some sense was the destruction -- of a
hierarchical society. In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had
enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and
possessed a motor-car or even an aeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps
the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it
once became general, wealth would confer no distinction. It was possible,
no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal
possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power
remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a
society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were
enjoyed by all alike, the grea