TECHNOLOGY, CLASS-CONFLICT, EMPLOYMENT 563
Western technology to increase production perhaps virtually adinfinitum
was running a race with the natural human refractoriness of the peasants
and the industrial workers. The World's teeming peasantry was threaten-
ing to cancel the benefits of technological progress by continuing to
raise the numbers of the World's population pari passu with each suc-
cessive increase in the means of subsistence that Technology might
achieve. The industrial workers were threatening to cancel the benefits
of technological progress by restricting production through trade-union
practices pari passu with each successive increase in the potentialities of
productivity thanks to the triumphal march of scientific invention.

(II) THE SITUATION AFTER THE
SECOND WORLD WAR

At the opening of the second half of the twentieth century of the
Christian Era the outstanding feature in Mankind's situation on the
economico-social plane in a world that was then undergoing a Western
Industrial Revolution was a tug-of-war between a regimentation that
was being imposed on Human Nature by the mechanization of the
World's work and an obstinate human impulse to strive for freedom
from regimentation, even if regimentation was the obligatory purchase-
price of freedom from want.

The crux of the situation was the hard fact that, in Human Life,
mechanization and police were as inseparable as Siamese twins. For
Human Nature this was an unpalatable truth; yet any living observer
of the age of sixty years or upwards who found himself shying at this
truth would be compelled to look it in the face if, on any journey that
he ever made by car, he compared the spectacle that now flashed past
his eyes with his memory of what the traffic on the roads had been like
in his childhood. Down to the close of the nineteenth century a trickle
of horse-drawn and hand-pushed vehicles had been exempt from police
control because it had been too slow and too thin to put life and limb in
any serious jeopardy if drivers were left to their own devices. By con-
trast, on a twentieth-century road crowded with swift passenger-cars
and ponderous lorries, travelling would have been, not merely perilous,
but impracticable if the traffic had not been elaborately regulated, and
if the regulations had not been strictly enforced. This change in the
regime of the road, which we have noticed already in another context,1
was an apt simile of the progressive encroachments on human freedom
that were being imposed upon Mankind by a progressive increase in
Man's command over Non-Human Nature and a consequent increase
in the power-charge of men's actions in their encounters with one
another.

An observer of this struggle between Technology's demand for
discipline and Human Nature's recalcitrance to regimentation might
find his impressions affected by the light in which he happened to be
viewing the scene. From the technician's angle of vision the recalcitrant
industrial workers* attitude rnight appear almost childishly unreasonable.

* In III. iiL 2o$-n.