562 PROSPECTS OF THE WESTERN CIVILIZATION
question whether the productivity of the cornucopia was really in-
exhaustible, as the importunity of the claims upon it assumed it to be;
and this question could be answered only by solving an equation in
which there were at least three unknown quantities.

The first of these unknown quantities was the extent of a latter-day
Western technology's potential capacity to satisfy the rising demands of
a Human Race which was continuing to multiply and was beginning to
ask for leisure. What were the planet's reserves of irreplaceable material
resources in the shape of minerals, and of replaceable material resources
in the shape of water-power and crops and livestock and man-power
and human skill ? How far could the resources so far tapped be made to
increase their yield by the application of more efficient methods of
extraction and processing and utilization ? And how far could Mankind's
wasting assets in the shape of irreplaceable resources be set off by the
tapping of alternative resources hitherto unexplored or at any rate un-
exploited ?

At the opening of the second half of the twentieth century of the
Christian Era the current findings of Western Science suggested to a
layman's mind that the Western technology's capacity was enormous;
but at the same time the contemporary reactions of Human Nature to
the impact of the Western technological revolution made it evident that
there might prove to be practical limitations on this human plane to a
productivity that might be virtually infinite in abstract terms of techno-
logical potentiality. The production that had been rendered technically
possible by a continuing and accelerating Industrial Revolution was a
potentiality that could not be translated into a reality unless and until
human hands could be found to hew the coal and stoke the fires and
pull the levers with a will; but the price of the immensely enhanced
power over Non-Human Nature that Western Man's mechanical prowess
had now brought within Mankind's grasp was a proportionate increase
in the regimentation of the workers and hi the pressure of their work
upon their life; and their inevitable resistance to these assaults on their
personal freedom was bound to militate against the realization of those
technological potentialities that had evoked the current demands for
freedom from want.

What was the extent of the sacrifices of personal freedom that the
workers would be prepared to make for the sake of increasing the size
of the cake of which they were each now demanding a larger slice ? How
far would the urban industrial workers go in submitting to 'scientific
management* ? And how far would the primitive peasant majority of
Mankind go in adopting Western scientific methods of agriculture and
in accepting limitations on a traditionally sacrosanct right and duty of
procreation ? These questions are probed further in a later chapter,1 and
the outcome of our examination of them there need not be anticipated
at this point except for reporting that, at the time of writing, it seemed
premature to expect to find precise values for these two further unknown
quantities in Mankind's current economic equation. At this stage the
most that could be said was that the potential capacity of a latter-day

1 On pp. 563-9 and 595-604, below.