so clamorous and imperative and facts so aggressively established as
to invade even the dingy seclusions of the judges and threaten the very
existence of the otherwise inattentive political machine.

The world was so little governed that with the very coming of plenty, in
the full tide of an incalculable abundance, when everything necessary
to satisfy human needs and everything necessary to realise such will
and purpose as existed then in human hearts was already at hand, one
has still to tell of hardship, famine, anger, confusion, conflict, and
incoherent suffering. There was no scheme for the distribution of this
vast new wealth that had come at last within the reach of men; there
was no clear conception that any such distribution was possible. As one
attempts a comprehensive view of those opening years of the new age,
as one measures it against the latent achievement that later years have
demonstrated, one begins to measure the blindness, the narrowness, the
insensate unimaginative individualism of the pre-atomic time. Under this
tremendous dawn of power and freedom, under a sky ablaze with promise,
in the very presence of science standing like some bountiful goddess
over all the squat darknesses of human life, holding patiently in
her strong arms, until men chose to take them, security, plenty, the
solution of riddles, the key of the bravest adventures, in her very
presence, and with the earnest of her gifts in court, the world was to
witness such things as the squalid spectacle of the Dass-Tata patent
litigation.

There in a stuffy court in London, a grimy oblong box of a room, during
the exceptional heat of the May of 1956, the leading counsel of the day
argued and shouted over a miserable little matter of more royalties
or less and whether the Dass-Tata company might not bar the
Holsten-Roberts' methods of utilising the new power. The Dass-Tata