They can't move about freely,-yet think of our cars and trains and planes. They have to live huddled together in shocking conditions,-yet a modem house can be a pocket palace. I don't know whether "all God's children have wings," but I'm sure they might fairly soon all have pocket palaces (or apartments in larger palaces), if we really set our minds to the job. And those palaces might be filled with articles of use and of luxury from every part of the earth. Yet actually in many cases people haven't enough blankets, and not even enough food.

Well, that's what we have done with machinery, for many people. But that's not all. Even those of us who are lucky, who are well fed and housed, are in a way enslaved to machinery. For we are all more or less machine-mad. Our minds stink with machinery, and the lust of mechanization. Our gods are speed, mechanical invention, and mass production. We are like children that are crazy over some new mechanical toy. We are becoming insensitive to all the really interesting things in the world. And we are going dead inside, dead in our essential selves. If you spend your time driving a car as fast as you can, or in running a factory or a business as fast as you can, you won't be troubled by uncomfortable thoughts. Mechanization is a dangerous drug that has got hold of us, and is eating into our minds.

Yet it might be a means for making such a world as has never existed before, a world of an entirely new kind, in which every man and woman would be developed in body and mind right up to the limit of his or her native capacity. As we were told last week, "We have all the resources and skill to give comfort and leisure to all men." And further, if "we" (which just means all of us working together), if we can secure for all men much leisure (voluntary leisure, not the forced and desolate leisure of the man out of a job), and if we can see that all children are helped to learn how to get the best out of their leisure, the world will-how shall I put it?-flower mentally. Men will cease to be the crippled, stunted minds that most of us are today. And then they will see through this obsession of machinery, and begin to use machinery purposefully, for sane ends. Instead of wanting to be speed hogs, they will want to be real persons, well-formed in body and mind. And they will want to make their world community into a fully awakened human community.

It would be dishonest and cowardly of me to paint a bright picture of the future of mechanization without first pointing out that everything depends on how we control the whole process, and who controls it. Whatever happens, mechanization will almost certainly increase (unless, indeed, civilization crashes, and science is lost). The machine age has only just begun to begin. Now hitherto the change over to mechanization has been managed by people whose effective motive has on the whole been private profit, and whose main interest has been- just mechanization. No thorough attempt has been made, save recently in Russia, to direct the whole process purposefully and strictly for the benefit of the community. And so things have gone in a haphazard, muddled way. The destiny of millions has been determined by massed, day-to-day private buyings and sellings, by the financial operations of private persons or groups of persons. Thus great power has come into the hands of a single section of the community.

Now these economic masters of society are mostly decent folks in private life; often kindly, self- sacrificing, and sincere. It's silly to think that all capitalists are knaves. According to their own lights they are often public spirited. Often too they are able.