The World Set Free by H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
page 37 of 227 (16%)
page 37 of 227 (16%)
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in both the Dass-Tata and Holsten-Roberts engines one of the recoverable
waste products was gold--the former disintegrated dust of bismuth and the latter dust of lead--and that this new supply of gold led quite naturally to a rise in prices throughout the world. This spectacle of feverish enterprise was productivity, this crowding flight of happy and fortunate rich people--every great city was as if a crawling ant-hill had suddenly taken wing--was the bright side of the opening phase of the new epoch in human history. Beneath that brightness was a gathering darkness, a deepening dismay. If there was a vast development of production there was also a huge destruction of values. These glaring factories working night and day, these glittering new vehicles swinging noiselessly along the roads, these flights of dragon-flies that swooped and soared and circled in the air, were indeed no more than the brightnesses of lamps and fires that gleam out when the world sinks towards twilight and the night. Between these high lights accumulated disaster, social catastrophe. The coal mines were manifestly doomed to closure at no very distant date, the vast amount of capital invested in oil was becoming unsaleable, millions of coal miners, steel workers upon the old lines, vast swarms of unskilled or under-skilled labourers in innumerable occupations, were being flung out of employment by the superior efficiency of the new machinery, the rapid fall in the cost of transit was destroying high land values at every centre of population, the value of existing house property had become problematical, gold was undergoing headlong depreciation, all the securities upon which the credit of the world rested were slipping and sliding, banks were tottering, the stock exchanges were scenes of feverish panic;--this was the reverse of the spectacle, these were the black and monstrous under-consequences of the Leap into the Air. |
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