TECHNOLOGY, CLASS-CONFLICT, EMPLOYMENT 605
alternating phases in a Yin-and-Yang rhythm beaten out bA&e per-
petually recurring astronomical cycles of Day-and-Night >nd^ .the.
Seasons. Each experience of either phase was both a relief froni§te4asjL-
bout, and at the same time a prelude to the next bout, of an alternate
phase that was psychologically complementary rather than antithetical
to the phase that happened at the moment to be in course. But this pre-
industrial interdependence and consequent parity between the psycho-
logical values of Work and Leisure had been deranged when the worker
had been transformed from a husbandman whose time-table was set for
him by Nature into a tender of machines with power-driven wheels that
could go on turning in season and out of season; for the chronic in-
dustrial warfare which the worker had now found himself compelled to
wage in order to prevent his new masters the machines from working
him to death had instilled into him, as we have seen,1 a negative, de-
fensive, hostile feeling towards a toil that his peasant forebears had taken
as a matter of course; and this new attitude towards Work had brought
with it a new attitude towards Leisure; for, if Work was intrinsically evil,
then Leisure must have an absolute value in itself.

Human Nature's reaction against the routine of the factory and the
office had indeed gone so far as to make the value of freedom from an
excessive pressure of work count for more than the value of the re-
muneration that the manual or clerical worker could earn by working at
full stretch; and this order of preferences, which in AJX 1949 had been
the conscious motive of the Wall Street typists* refusal to come to work
on Saturdays,2 had been implicit from the outset in the restrictive
practices that Trade Unionism had worked out for itself; for these were
methods of purchasing relief from the pressure of work by the sacrifice
of potential earnings. This rating of leisure—at least in the negative
form of an exemption from an excessive pressure of mechanized work—
at a higher value than money-making was a preference which, in the
first chapter of post-industrial Western history, had been a distinguish-
ing mark of the industrial and clerical workers and a prime cause of dis-
pute between them and their employers; and this attitude had begun to
communicate itself from the working class to a hitherto pre-industrial-
minded middle class in a subsequent chapter in which the working
class's more and more effectively insistent demand for social justice was
being met by a more and more drastic redistribution of purchasing power
through the differentially graded taxation of middle-class incomes. By
the sixth decade of the twentieth century of the Christian Era the
Western middle class had begun to follow the working class's example
by opting for leisure in preference to profits at a level of income—and
this level was progressively being lowered—at which the greater part of
any additional earnings would be taken from the nominal recipient by
the tax-collector.

At the same time the so far unchecked advance of Technology at a
constantly accelerating pace was playing a sardonic practical joke on its
human victims; for, while the ceaseless turning of the never tiring
wheels was threatening to work them to death, it was simultaneously

1 On pp. 563-9, above. z See p. 570, above.