For the first time in modern history, the number of homicides exceeded the number of suicides. In general, crimes of stealth virtually ceased to occur, while crimes of violence continued at about their previous level and reported cases of rape declined spectacularly. Numerous government officials admitted themselves guilty of peculation and malfeasance in office. The business bureaucracy was even harder hit. Among the casualties was a prominent board member of Gorley and Gorley. To my particular satisfaction, the mayor our local machine had elected made a public speech--apparently unaware that he was doing anything out of the way--in which he thanked by name the boys who had purchased the most votes for him in the last campaign, also those who had put in the strong-arm work. All the F.B.I. agents doing undercover work in the Communist Party were exposed, and as a result the party went bankrupt for lack of dues paying members. As O’Brien had predicted, the advertising business collapsed, burying many lesser enterprises under the ruins. But somehow no general financial panic took place. A man from Texas was heard to confess that he sometimes got tired of hearing about Texas, and even admitted it couldn’t be twice as large as the rest of the United States. Events such as these were the convulsions, the death throes of an old world and the birth pangs of a new. Their final phase was the breakdown of the international situation, which had continued for over a decade in a sort of deadly balance. The balance was destroyed when U. S. and other Western diplomats adopted a new tack which provoked, in their Eastern-bloc opponents, reactions first of suspicious alarm, then of bafflement, and finally of a dazed conviction that the spirit of Marxian history had at long last delivered the enemy into their hands--which last impression led directly to their undoing. Forgetting the chiseler’s basic precept--you can’t cheat an honest man--they set about exploiting the situation by extracting from the West all the technical information they coveted, and which was now theirs for the asking. Along with plutonium refinement methods and guided missile designs, they obtained, naturally, the formula for Grandma’s lie soap, alias Verolin. The counterparts of Gorley and Gorley’s sales department, in their government-run industries, were also shrewdly alive to the importance of having satisfied customers. Clearly, they reasoned, studying our records, this is a good thing, this is a valuable bit of _kul’tura_.... From there on developments followed pretty much the pattern already established in the West. There were some painful incidents, such as the Kiev massacre of former secret police agents, and the three days when _Pravda_ shut down to retool. But on the whole, the reaction was more than anything else like that of a man who comes to the top and takes breath at last, after very nearly drowning.