None of this can happen without much blind and violent resistance. But, of course, it will not happen all at once, not all in one place, nor in every case with a clear meaning. And it is not certain that any amount of experience, however painful, will bring nations to adopt what we have called a symbiotic principle of commerce with one another. There is at first the danger that agriculture in its turn will exploit industry as industry has exploited peasantry and that those who possess or control resources of food and raw materials will hold them too dear, thereby taking the industrial nations into their debt or provoking them to insane measures. Thus the opportunity to go forward might be lost in passion. The fate of retrogression is possible. This has happened many times. It is much less probable than ever before, however, for many reasons that seem permanent. When knowledge was a precious torch borne aloft by a few hands through storm and stress, it was easily quenched. Then darkness. You can hardly imagine destruction of the existing body of science, technology, and fact-knowledge. The mass of it is too great to be lost. That, of course, has nothing to do with wisdom. By knowledge alone man might extinguish himself utterly. But to suppose that he will not find a new way to go on with, that he will either move the old struggle to new ground or return to medievalism, is to believe there is no law of human progress. The probability is that he will find the way unknowingly, by groping, and will be well upon it before he has had time to formulate any clear idea or theory of what he is doing. He will have found little by little that it pays, better than any other way, not as he once understood profit, but in terms of enduring satisfactions, which may include peace. Critical understanding of it will come later with reflection, and as it comes he will rid his mind of the phantasy in pursuit of which he has made the world so much richer in things than in happiness. Seeing now only how relentlessly the curse pursued him still and how the affliction of monotonous toil if it be lifted in one place is made heavier in another, he is torn with a sense of frustration. But the view is wrong—false to his first nature. He forgets the truth of his own myth. Somewhere down the ages it got turned upside down. Once he dwelt in the Garden of Eden, or supposed he did, and cared not for it. He was bored there and beguiled to his fall. The figure at the gate forbidding his return is a symbol of self-knowledge; it was set there by his own forethought, lest he should be tempted to go back. If the machine with which he has believed himself to be storming a childish wish ever brought him to a state of effortless ease on earth, that would be his last. It may be a power he is yet morally unprepared to exercise. How strange at least that with an incentive so trivial and naïve in itself he should have been able to perform an absolute feat of creation!