TECHNOLOGY, CLASS-CONFLICT, EMPLOYMENT 607

work in a mechanized society and by the ruthless efficiency of the tax-
collector in a welfare state in reaping where he had not sown and gather-
ing where he had not strawed,1 this was surely a blessing in disguise for
a Homo Occidentalis whose characteristic temptation had been to sell his
soul if that was the market price of worldly prosperity. A society in
which a minority had been allowed and encouraged to enrich themselves
without restriction was surely a less estimable society than one in which
a more equitable distribution of wealth was being secured at a cost of
restricting the opportunities for enrichment and perhaps thereby dimi-
nishing, through the diminution of incentives to earn, the aggregate
amount of the wealth that was now being less inequitably distributed.3
So far, so good; yet a mid-twentieth-century observer could not hail
the reluctant transfer of psychic energy from money-making to the en-
joyment of leisure as an unquestionable blessing, even for a Western
Man whose nineteenth-century god had been Mammon, without taking
into account the use to which the frustrated Mammon-worshipper was
going to put the leisure for which he was now opting in preference to
making money for the tax-collector to redistribute. This question had
been raised in a notable address delivered, some twenty years before the
time of going to press, by a philosophic spokesman of those magician-
engineers whose cornucopia had 'been shaken over all the Earth, scatter-
ing everywhere an endowment of previously unpossessed and unimagined
capacities and powers'.3 Speaking at York on the 3ist August, 1932, to
the British Association for the Advancement of Science, their president,
Sir Alfred Ewing, had ended on the following note:

'We must admit that there is a sinister side even to the peaceful activities
of those who in good faith and with the best intentions make it their
business to adapt the resources of Nature to the use and convenience of
Man. Where shall we look for a remedy? I cannot tell. Some may envisage
a distant Utopia in which there will be perfect adjustment of labour and
the fruits of labour, a fair spreading of employment and of wages and of
all the commodities that machines produce. Even so the question will
remain. How is Man to spend the leisure he has won by handing over
nearly all his burden to an untiring mechanical slave? Dare he hope for
such spiritual betterment as will qualify him to use it well ? God grant
[that] he may strive for that and attain it. It is only by seeking [that] he
will find. I cannot think that Man is destined to atrophy and cease through
cultivating what, after all, is one of his most God-like faculties—the
creative ingenuity of the engineer.'

The pertinence of Sir Alfred Ewing's question about Mankind's
spiritual prospects in a world that was being mechanized by a Western
technique was brought home to a student of the Hellenic Classics by the
reminiscence of a passage in a treatise on Sublimity in Style which had
been written during the reprieve that a disintegrating Hellenic Society
had won for itself through an Augustan rally of its retreating forces.4

Matt. xxv. 24 and 26; Luke xix. 21-22.

•whether this work had been written in the third century of the Christian Era or hi the
first.