There is a story of a demented London stockbroker running out into
Threadneedle Street and tearing off his clothes as he ran. 'The Steel
Trust is scrapping the whole of its plant,' he shouted. 'The State
Railways are going to scrap all their engines. Everything's going to
be scrapped--everything. Come and scrap the mint, you fellows, come and
scrap the mint!'

In the year 1955 the suicide rate for the United States of America
quadrupled any previous record. There was an enormous increase also
in violent crime throughout the world. The thing had come upon an
unprepared humanity; it seemed as though human society was to be smashed
by its own magnificent gains.

For there had been no foresight of these things. There had been no
attempt anywhere even to compute the probable dislocations this flood
of inexpensive energy would produce in human affairs. The world in these
days was not really governed at all, in the sense in which government
came to be understood in subsequent years. Government was a treaty,
not a design; it was forensic, conservative, disputatious, unseeing,
unthinking, uncreative; throughout the world, except where the vestiges
of absolutism still sheltered the court favourite and the trusted
servant, it was in the hands of the predominant caste of lawyers,
who had an enormous advantage in being the only trained caste. Their
professional education and every circumstance in the manipulation of the
fantastically naive electoral methods by which they clambered to
power, conspired to keep them contemptuous of facts, conscientiously
unimaginative, alert to claim and seize advantages and suspicious of
every generosity. Government was an obstructive business of energetic
fractions, progress went on outside of and in spite of public
activities, and legislation was the last crippling recognition of needs