tes upon
which man must depend for his economic life. They are scattered it is
true, and with the present political barriers holding peoples apart,
many of them are politically unavailable but, economically, they are an
open door to the future.

Men have met with considerable success in availing themselves of
nature's bounty, and of converting it into useful and pleasing forms.
All of the tools, weapons, textiles, metals, wheels, machines, have been
the result of human effort and ingenuity, spread over long periods of
time, and gradually accumulated and concentrated. At last a day seems to
have dawned when machinery, applied to nature's bounty, could produce
the wealth necessary to support the world's existing population on a
minimum standard of living. Certainly the energy and wealth which went
into the five war years would have fed and clothed the people for that
period.

8. _Distribution and the Social Revolution_

Men have succeeded in kindling fires, making wheels, separating the
metal from the ore, harnessing electrical power and communicating their
thoughts to one another and to their descendants, but they have not made
themselves masters of those forces which work through fire and wheels.
Men have met the immediate economic problem by devising methods for
producing food, clothes and roof-trees, but they have been overwhelmed
by the social implications of these productive forces. Before the
problem of sharing the proceeds of their labor, they have stopped, and
the whole economic progress of the race now stands like an engine
stalled, awaiting some solution of the problems of distribution.

Through the ages various methods of making a living were inaugurated
successively. Medieval Europe had worked out a combination of herding,
agriculture, craft industry and trade that made a stable life for an
agricultural village a practical possibility.

This period of economic stability--this golden age--was followed by a
series of events that threw the fat into the fire. First in England,
and then in all of the important countries of Europe, the industrial
revolution turned the simple grazing, farming, craft-industry life of
the village topsy-turvy, by providing a new method of converting
nature's bounty into goods and services calculated to meet the
increasing needs and wants of mankind. So far-reaching was the change
that it has compelled a reorganization of virtually all phases of social
life, but for the prese