16 DANGEROUS THOUGHTS

To-day scientific knowledge offers us the possibility of a new
plan of social living more akin to the Utopia of a William Morris
or an Edward Carpenter. Mobile power, aviation, and electrical
communications make it possible to distribute population at a
high level of productive capacity without the disabilities of cul-
tural isolation. A high potential of leisure and creature comforts
no longer demands the beehive pattern of social living. Co-
operative organization in the age of hydroelectric power, of light
metals, of artificial fertilizers, and of applied genetics offer us new
instruments of manufacture, new means of transport, and new
means of communications, l>oth to restore the serenity of small
community life and to promote a lively sympathy with folk in
other lands. Broadcasting has now brought the cultural benefits
of travel to the bedside, and scientific horticulture offers us a
programme of bio-esthetic planning which may prove more
congenial to basic human needs than the spectacle of a sixpenny
store building.

The straphanging multitudes of our great cities need circuses
as well as bread. It is no longer Utopian to ask what sort of
circus human nature demands. The Thifd Reich has given its own
answer. The answer is Jew-baiting, war, and neopagan weddings.
The revolt against the beehive city of competitive industrialism
has already become a retreat into barbarism. The rretreat will
continue unless science can foster a lively recognition of the
positive achievements of civilization by reinstating faith in a
future of constructive effort. It will not be arrested by old-school-
tie Socialists fresh from the exploits of the Oxford Union or by
a radical intelligentsia whose social culture is a judicious blending
of flexions and genuflexions.

Seventy years ago it was still possible to discuss whether
poverty is morally tolerable or materially inevitable. It was still
possible to discuss whether war is spiritually edifying or socially
escapable. All this is changed. Poverty in the sense in which it
was then defined, the sense in which the word is intelligible to
the social biologist, is not materially inevitable. The only obstacle
to removing it is lack of social initiative. War is not a moral