roads may be taken as a mark of increasing social disorganisation and
police embarrassment--he wandered out into the open country. He speaks
of the roads of that plutocratic age as being 'fenced with barbed wire
against unpropertied people,' of the high-walled gardens and trespass
warnings that kept him to the dusty narrowness of the public ways. In
the air, happy rich people were flying, heedless of the misfortunes
about them, as he himself had been flying two years ago, and along
the road swept the new traffic, light and swift and wonderful. One was
rarely out of earshot of its whistles and gongs and siren cries even
in the field paths or over the open downs. The officials of the labour
exchanges were everywhere overworked and infuriated, the casual wards
were so crowded that the surplus wanderers slept in ranks under sheds
or in the open air, and since giving to wayfarers had been made a
punishable offence there was no longer friendship or help for a man from
the rare foot passenger or the wayside cottage....

'I wasn't angry,' said Barnet. 'I saw an immense selfishness, a
monstrous disregard for anything but pleasure and possession in all
those people above us, but I saw how inevitable that was, how certainly
if the richest had changed places with the poorest, that things would
have been the same. What else can happen when men use science and every
new thing that science gives, and all their available intelligence and
energy to manufacture wealth and appliances, and leave government and
education to the rustling traditions of hundreds of years ago? Those
traditions come from the dark ages when there was really not enough
for every one, when life was a fierce struggle that might be masked
but could not be escaped. Of course this famine grabbing, this fierce
dispossession of others, must follow from such a disharmony between
material and training. Of course the rich were vulgar and the poor grew
savage and every added power that came to men made the rich richer and