ABSTRACT
True, modern research into nuclear physics, electronics, drugs and biochemistry have made possible a kind of life hitherto unimaginable on this planet; and it is true, too, that man’s moral development has not kept pace with his scientific discoveries and is pitifully inadequate to the powers he now possesses. Liberals have always been the challengers of privilege; they have always fought for the enlargement of liberty on the ground of the essential dignity of human nature. Liberty is jeopardized through moral inertia; it is jeopardized no less by the development of the machine. Human beings under modern industrial conditions are herded together in enormous cities, their task being to serve and tend machines. The Communist Party in Russia, like the present government in the Union of South Africa, suffers inevitably from a siege-mentality. Socialism though hydra-headed is in all its forms incompatible with that liberty which man desires and is losing its appeal even in the lands of its origin.
