TECHNOLOGY, CLASS-CONFLICT, EMPLOYMENT 597

by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. Even if
we assume that the minimum standard of living that a future oecumeni-
cal authority would have undertaken to secure for the population of the
World would have been no higher than the minimum standard for the
population of England that had been contemplated in Queen Elizabeth's
Toor Law' statute of A.D. 1601, a situation in which any authority would
have assumed any responsibility for guaranteeing the whole living gene-
ration of Mankind against starvation in a world in which the production
of food would have reached its ceiling would be a situation in which the
begetting of children would have ceased to be the private affair of wives
and husbands and have become the public concern of a ubiquitous
impersonal disciplinary power.

If this situation were one day to arise, it would impose on Mankind
one of the most drastic revolutions in human history since the first
essays in Civilization; for hitherto men and women had not only been at
liberty to beget children at their own discretion but had enjoyed this
freedom when they had been destitute of all other rights and assets.
This historic freedom was attested, as we have noticed in an earlier con-
text,1 by the etymology of the word 'proletariat'; for that technical term
in the vocabulary of a Modern Western sociology was derived from a
Latin word coined for the statistical purposes of the Roman census to
describe a category of Roman citizens 'who had nothing but their chil-
dren to enter in their returns as their contribution to the common weal' ,2
This Roman administrative terminology was an eloquent testimony to
the truth that, in the history of Man in Process of Civilization up to date,
no government—not even the most meticulous and most inquisitorial
tyranny—had ever thought of contesting its subjects' freedom to repro-
duce their kind.

The nearest that governments had come hitherto towards intruding
on this inner sanctum of private life had been to institute negative or posi-
tive rewards for the parents of large families if the public authorities
were anxious to obtain an increase in their supplies of man-power or
cannon-fodder; but they had no more dreamed of forbidding their sub-
jects to restrict the size of their families than they had dreamed of com-
pelling them, instead of merely inducing them, to multiply. Indeed, the
freedom to beget or not to beget had been hitherto so uncontroversially
sacrosanct that it had been tacitly taken for granted; and even as late as
A.D. 1941 it had not occurred to President Roosevelt to raise the number
of the axiomatic human freedoms consecrated in his charter from four to
five by explicitly putting on record a wife's and husband's sacred right
to determine the size of their own families,3 It now looked as if the future
might show that there had been an unintentional logic in Roosevelt's
artless silence on this point, since it appeared that in the last resort—

1 In I. i. 41, n. 3.

* 'Proletarii dicti strut plebeii qui nihil rei publicae exhibeant sed tantum prolem
sufHciant' (Nonius Marcellinus in his Compendio$a Doctrinaper Litteras, quoted ibid.),

3 This right was not challenged in principle by the baa on the procurement of abortion,
or even by the ban on the advertisement and sale of artificial contraceptives, that was the
kw of the land in many countries at the time of writing; for, in theory at least, these bans
still left husbands and wives free to limit the size of their families by the exercise of
sexual self-control.