appetites and imaginations by those with stronger
appetites and imaginations, has been a necessary phase in human
development. With my innate passionate desire to find the whole world
purposeful, I cannot but believe that. But however necessary it has
been, it is necessary no longer. Strangest of saviors, there rises over
the conflicts of mankind the glittering angular promise of the machine.
There is no longer any need for slavery, open or disguised. We do not
need slaves nor toilers nor mere laborers any more; they are no longer
essential to a civilization. Man has ridden on his brother man out of
the need of servitude. He struggles through to a new phase, a phase of
release, a phase when leisure and an unexampled freedom is possible to
every human being. Is possible. And it is there one halts seeing that
splendid possibility of aspiration and creation before mankind--and
seeing mankind for the most part still downcast, quite unaware or
incredulous, following the old rounds, the grooves of ancient and
superseded assumptions and subjections....

But here I will not trace in any detail the growth of my conviction
that the ancient and heavy obligation to work hard and continually
throughout life has already slipped from man's shoulders. Suffice it
that now I conceive of the task before mankind as a task essentially of
rearrangement, as a problem in relationships, extremely complex and
difficult indeed, but credibly solvable. During my Indian and Chinese
journey I was still at the Marxist stage. I went about the east looking
at labor, watching its organization and direction, seeing great
interests and enterprises replace the diffused life of an earlier phase;
the disputes and discussions in the Transvaal which had first opened my
mind to these questions came back to me, and steadily I lost my interest
in those mere political and national issues with their paraphernalia of
kings and flags and governments and parties that had hitherto blinded me
to these more fundamental interactions.

Sec. 2

It happened that in Bombay circumstances conspired to bring the crude
facts of labor enslavement vividly before me. I found a vigorous
agitation raging in the English press against the horrible sweating that
was going on in the cotton mills, I met the journalist most intimately
concerned in the business on my second day in India, and before a week
was out I was hard at work getting up the question and preparing a
memorandum with