he side of the new power and from the point of view of
those who financed and manufactured the new engines and material
it required the age of the Leap into the Air was one of astonishing
prosperity. Patent-holding companies were presently paying dividends
of five or six hundred per cent. and enormous fortunes were made
and fantastic wages earned by all who were concerned in the new
developments. This prosperity was not a little enhanced by the fact that
in both the Dass-Tata and Holsten-Roberts engines one of the recoverable
waste products was gold--the former disintegrated dust of bismuth and
the latter dust of lead--and that this new supply of gold led quite
naturally to a rise in prices throughout the world.

This spectacle of feverish enterprise was productivity, this crowding
flight of happy and fortunate rich people--every great city was as if
a crawling ant-hill had suddenly taken wing--was the bright side of the
opening phase of the new epoch in human history. Beneath that brightness
was a gathering darkness, a deepening dismay. If there was a vast
development of production there was also a huge destruction of values.
These glaring factories working night and day, these glittering
new vehicles swinging noiselessly along the roads, these flights of
dragon-flies that swooped and soared and circled in the air, were indeed
no more than the brightnesses of lamps and fires that gleam out when the
world sinks towards twilight and the night. Between these high lights
accumulated disaster, social catastrophe. The coal mines were manifestly
doomed to closure at no very distant date, the vast amount of capital
invested in oil was becoming unsaleable, millions of coal miners, steel
workers upon the old lines, vast swarms of unskilled or under-skilled
labourers in innumerable occupations, were being flung out of employment
by the superior efficiency of the new machinery, the rapid fall in
the cost of transit was destroying high land values at every centre
of population, the value of existing house property had become
problematical, gold was undergoing headlong depreciation, all the
securities upon which the credit of the world rested were slipping
and sliding, banks were tottering, the stock exchanges were scenes of
feverish panic;--this was the reverse of the spectacle, these were the
black and monstrous under-consequences of the Leap into the Air.

There is a story of a demented London stockbroker running out into
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