lse rising again in its latest and greatest effort, the creative
impulse rising again, as a wave rises from the trough of its
predecessors, out of the ruins of our parent system, imperial Rome. But
this time, and for the first time, the effort is world-wide, and China
and Iceland, Patagonia and Central Africa all swing together with us to
make--or into another catastrophic failure to make--the Great State of
mankind. All this I had now distinctly in my mind. The new process I
perceive had gone further in the west; was most developed in the west.
The lighter end lifts first. So back I came away from the great body of
mankind, which is Asia, to its head. And since I was still held by my
promise from returning to England I betook myself first to the Pas de
Calais and then to Belgium and thence into industrial Germany, to study
the socialistic movement at its sources.

And I was beginning to see too very clearly by the time of my return
that what is confusedly called the labor problem is really not one
problem at all, but two. There is the old problem, the problem as old as
Zimbabwe and the pyramids, the declining problem, the problem of
organizing masses of unskilled labor to the constructive ends of a Great
State, and there is the new modification due to machinery, which has
rendered unskilled labor and labor of a low grade of skill almost
unnecessary to mankind, added coal, oil, wind and water, the elementary
school and the printing-press to our sources of power, and superseded
the ancient shepherding and driving of men by the possibility of their
intelligent and willing co-operation. The two are still mixed in every
discussion, even as they are mixed in the practice of life, but
inevitably they will be disentangled. We break free from slavery, open
or disguised, just as we illuminate and develop this disentanglement....

I have long since ceased to trouble about the economics of human
society. Ours are not economic but psychological difficulties. There is
enough for everyone, and only a fool can be found to deny it. But our
methods of getting and making are still ruled by legal and social
traditions from the time before we had tapped these new sources of
power, before there was more than enough for everyone, and when a bare
supply was only secured by jealous possession and unremitting toil. We
have no longer to secure enough by a stern insistence. We have come to a
plenty. The problem now is to make that plenty go round