TECHNOLOGY, CLASS-CONFLICT, EMPLOYMENT 601
kind still had something to learn, on its side, from the unworldly vein1
in the ethos of a Peasantry which, in preference to hoarding the bread
that it wrung from the ground in sorrow and in the sweat of its face,2 had
shared this hard-earned nutriment with an ever-increasing progeny in
childlike obedience to Elohim's commandment to be fruitful and multi-
ply and replenish the Earth and subdue it.3 This traditional religious duty,
which had been laid upon the peasantry at the moment when they were
reclaiming their first tiny fields from an apparently boundless wilderness,
might become a bane instead of a blessing for Mankind in an age that had
seen the OtkoumenPs last reserves of cultivable land brought under the
plough in the Americas, Australia, Qazaqstan, and Manchuria; but,
inasmuch as this was also the age that had witnessed the rise of an
acquisitive Western industrial civilization, it was no time for despising
and rejecting the Peasantry's traditional virtue of subordinating the quest
for material well-being to the pursuit of a non-material objective; for, in
making nonsense of the Peasantry's ancestral worship of the Family, the
Industrial Revolution had not discredited the abiding truth that Man is
not merely a consumer but is also a soul, and that the Soul lives *by
every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God'.4 'For what is a mt\r\
profited if he shall gain the whole World and lose his own soul? Or what
shall a man give in exchange for his soul ?'s

A latter-day Western Man had brought himself into danger of losing
his soul through his concentration on a sensationally successful endea-
vour to increase his production of material commodities; and it was ironi-
cal that the society which had put itself in this spiritual jeopardy should
have been one which, by comparison with a contemporary peasantry
in Asia, Africa, and Indian America, had already been in enjoyment
of a lavish standard of living at the time when it had embarked on its
eighteenth-century agricultural and industrial revolutions. The insatiabi-
lity of the Westerners* acquisitiveness laid them open to a Western philo-
sopher's indictment.

'The Indian scale of values has never been at all like ours. On the whole
it is true to say that in India the love of God has always been put above
the love of material things. India is a civilisation based on Religion, while
ours is a civilisation based on wealth.*6

If an industriali2ed Western Society was to find salvation in spite of
itself, it would find it in virtue of having all the time unconsciously been

1 This tin-worldly vein was, of course, only one element in the Łthos of a Peasantry
that was saddled with as heavy a load of Original Sin as a contemporary Industrial
Proletariat with whom it had in common a uniform Human Nature. The peasant ethos,
like the urban Sthos, had its selfish, exploitative, and materialistic side; and there were
peasantries—for example, in the Flemish and French provinces of a Western World—
in whose spiritual 'make-up' these unattractive characteristics were not perceptibly
mitigated by the touch of archaic piety with which they were still apt to be combined in
the character of the peasantries in the non-Westem societies. A sentimentally idealized
portrait of a non-Western peasantry, when painted with a Western brush, might be
suspect of being a subjective expression of the pointer's dissatisfaction with the short-
comings of his own society rather than an objective reproduction of the observed linea-
ments of the picture's professed subject. * Gen. iii. 17-19.

3 Gen. i. 28. Cp. Gen. ix. i and 7. 4 Matt. iv. 4. Cp. Lukeiv, 4. $ Matt. rvL 26.

« Stace, W. T.: What are Our Values? (Lincoln, Nebraska 1950, University of
Nebraska Press), p. 54.