606 PROSPECTS OF THE WESTERN CIVILIZATION

threatening, in consequence, to throw them into technological unem-
ployment, without ever allowing them to make up their minds which of
these two contradictory scourges of Industrialism was the greater menace
to human welfare and happiness. The industrial workers had no sooner
reacted against the pressure of mechanization by insisting upon their
right to leisure than their inhuman tyrant and tormentor Technology
began to drive them into insisting upon their right to work by taking
them at their word and forcing leisure upon them; and, although the
trade-union practices that had been devised for putting a brake upon
the killing 'drive' of mechanized industrial work also served the workers'
further purpose of spinning out the residue of the employment that was
now being snatched out of human hands by progressive improvements
in the machinery that these hands were tending, this rear-guard action of
Trade Unionism in a fight to make an inexorably dwindling amount of
work still go round was manifestly a losing battle.

Technology and Trade Unionism, between them, were thus generat-
ing an abundance of Leisure that was unprecedented; and the manifest
irresistibility of this tendency was making it possible to cast the occupa-
tional horoscope of a future Oecumenical Society that would have rid
itself of War and Class-Conflict and have found some acceptable way of
regulating the movement of population. In this Earthly Paradise Re-
gained, a regime of full employment would also be a regime in which the
ration of work that could be doled out to each individual would occupy
so small a fraction of his day that he would have almost as much leisure
on his hands as if he had been a member of the privileged minority in
some antediluvian agrarian society. In such circumstances the use made
of Leisure would evidently be even more important than it had been in
a pre-industrial chapter of human history in which Homo Fdber had still
been such a tiro in his Technology that the number of man-hours which
he had yet been able to liberate for Leisure had been minute by com-
parison with the number that he had still been compelled to devote to
Work.

If there was a prospect of such revolutionary changes as these in the
amount of the leisure acquired by, or thrust upon, Man, as well as in
Man's attitude toward Leisure in its relation to Work, what effects on
Human Life might this revolution be expected to have ?

In an industrialized Western Society in which an excessive acquisitive-
ness had been the besetting sin of its middle-class moving spirits, there
was one negative effect that was manifestly good in itself as far as it went.
By the time when the middle class, as well as the working class, had
begun to value Leisure more highly than earnings, it was beginning to
look as if the mechanism of the Industrial System of economic produc-
tion included a providential automatic brake that might perhaps avail
to save Homo Faber Mechamcus from his demonic self. In making the
Industrial Revolution, Western Man's acquisitive-mindedness had per-
haps unintentionally been working out a cure for itself by first making
work odious and then making this now already odious work also unre-
munerative. If a shark-like Western appetite for acquisition was thus
having its edge taken off by the pressure and the insipidity of routine-