but equallypracticable, and the Krupp-Erlanger came hard upon
the heels of this, and by the autumn of 1954 a gigantic

replacement of industrial methods and machinery was in progress
all about the habitable globe. Small wonder was this when the

cost, even of these earliest and clumsiest of atomic engines, is
compared with that of the power they superseded. Allowing for

lubrication the Dass-Tata engine, once it was started cost a
penny to run thirty-seven miles, and added only nine and quarter

pounds to the weight of the carriage it drove. It made the heavy
alcohol-driven automobile of the time ridiculous in appearance as

well as preposterously costly. For many years the price of coal
and every form of liquid fuel had been clambering to levels that

made even the revival of the draft horse seem a practicable
possibility, and now with the abrupt relaxation of this

stringency, the change in appearance of the traffic upon the
world's roads was instantaneous. In three years the frightful

armoured monsters that had hooted and smoked and thundered about
the world for four awful decades were swept away to the dealers

in old metal, and the highways thronged with light and clean and
shimmering shapes of silvered steel. At the same time a new

impetus was given to aviation by the relativelyenormous power
for weight of the atomic engine, it was at last possible to add

Redmayne's ingenioushelicopterascent and descent engine to the
vertical propeller that had hitherto been the sole driving force

of the aeroplane without overweighting the machine, and men found
themselves possessed of an instrument of flight that could hover

or ascend or descend vertically and gently as well as rush wildly
through the air. The last dread of flying vanished. As the

journalists of the time phrased it, this was the epoch of the
Leap into the Air. The new atomicaeroplane became indeed a

mania; every one of means was frantic to possess a thing so
controllable, so secure and so free from the dust and danger of

the road, and in France alone in the year 1943 thirty thousand of
these new aeroplanes were manufactured and licensed, and soared

humming softly into the sky.
And with an equal speed atomic engines of various types invaded

industrialism. The railways paid enormous premiums for priority
in the delivery of atomic traction engines, atomic smelting was

embarked upon so eagerly as to lead to a number of disastrous
explosions due to inexperienced handling of the new power, and

the revolutionary cheapening of both materials and electricity
made the entire reconstruction of domestic buildings a matter

merely dependent upon a reorganisation of the methods of the
builder and the house-furnisher. Viewed from the 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 astonishingprosperity.
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 feverishenterprise 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 Threadneedle Street and tearing off his clothes as he ran.
'The Steel Trust is scrapping the whole of its plant,' he

shouted. 'The State Railways are going to scrap all their
engines. Everything's going to be scrapped--everything. Come and

scrap the mint, you fellows, come and scrap the mint!'
In the year 1955 the suicide rate for the United States of

America quadrupled any previous record. There was an enormous
increase also in violent crime throughout the world. The thing

had come upon an unprepared humanity; it seemed as though human
society was to be smashed by its own magnificent gains.

For there had been no foresight of these things. There had been
no attempt anywhere even to compute the probable dislocations

this flood of inexpensiveenergy would produce in human affairs.
The world in these days was not really governed at all, in the

sense in which government came to be understood in subsequent
years. Government was a treaty, not a design; it was forensic,

conservative, disputatious, unseeing, unthinking, uncreative;
throughout the world, except where the vestiges of absolutism

still sheltered the court favourite and the trusted servant, it
was in the hands of the predominant caste of lawyers, who had an

enormousadvantage in being the only trained caste. Their
professional education and every circumstance in the manipulation

of the fantastically naive electoral methods by which they
clambered to power, conspired to keep them contemptuous of facts,

conscientiously unimaginative, alert to claim and seize
advantages and suspicious of every generosity. Government was an

obstructive business of energetic fractions, progress went on
outside of and in spite of public activities, and legislation was

the last crippling recognition of needs so clamorous and
imperative and facts so aggressively established as to invade

even the dingy seclusions of the judges and threaten the very
existence of the otherwise inattentive political machine.

The world was so little governed that with the very coming of
plenty, in the full tide of an incalculable abundance, when

everything necessary to satisfy human needs and everything
necessary to realise such will and purpose as existed then in

human hearts was already at hand, one has still to tell of
hardship, famine, anger, confusion, conflict, and incoherent

suffering. There was no scheme for the distribution of this vast
new wealth that had come at last within the reach of men; there

was no clear conception that any such distribution was possible.
As one attempts a comprehensive view of those opening years of

the new age, as one measures it against the latent achievement
that later years have demonstrated, one begins to measure the

blindness, the narrowness, the insensate unimaginative
individualism of the pre-atomic time. Under this tremendous dawn

of power and freedom, under a sky ablaze with promise, in the
very presence of science standing like some bountiful goddess

over all the squat darknesses of human life, holdingpatiently in
her strong arms, until men chose to take them, security, plenty,

the solution of riddles, the key of the bravest adventures, in
her very presence, and with the earnest of her gifts in court,

the world was to witness such things as the squalid spectacle of
the Dass-Tata patent litigation.

There in a stuffy court in London, a grimy oblong box of a room,
during the exceptional heat of the May of 1956, the leading

counsel of the day argued and shouted over a miserable little
matter of more royalties or less and whether the Dass-Tata

company might not bar the Holsten-Roberts' methods of utilising
the new power. The Dass-Tata people were indeed making a

strenuous attempt to secure a world monopoly in atomic
engineering. The judge, after the manner of those times, sat