ESSAYS IN PERSUASION

PART

360

ism of the reactionaries who consider the balanceof our economic and social life so precariousthat we must risk no experiments.

My purpose in this essay, however, is not toexamine the present or the near future, but todisembarrass myself of short views and takewings into the future. What can we reasonablyexpect the level of our economic life to be ahundred years hence? What are the economicpossibilities for our grandchildren?

From the earliest times of which we haverecord—back, say, to two thousand years beforeChrist—down to the beginning of the eighteenthcentury, there was no very great change in thestandard of life of the average man living in thecivilised centres of the earth. Ups and downscertainly. Visitations of plague, famine, andwar. Golden intervals. But no progressive,violent change. Some periods perhaps 50 percent better than others—at the utmost 100 percent better—in the four thousand years whichended (say) in a.d. 1700.

This slow rate of progress, or lack of pro-gress, was due to two reasons—to the remark-able absence of important technical improve-ments and to the failure of capital to accumulate.

The absence of important technical inven-tions between the prehistoric age and com-paratively modern times is truly remarkable.Almost everything which really matters andwhich the world possessed at the commence-ment of the modern age was already known toman at the dawn of history. Language, fire,