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.
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