EarthCentre: The End of the Universe:THE UNIVERSAL-SKULL

Long before the world breakdown became manifest, the experience of the ordinary consumer so far belied the sanguine theory that free competition was a mode of endless progress that he was still living in a house, wearing clothes, using appliances, travelling about in conveyances, and being fed with phrases and ideas that by the standard of the known and worked-out inventions of the time should have been discarded on an average (Hooker computes) from a quarter to half a century before. There was labour unemployed and abundant material available to remedy all this, but its utilization was held up by the rent-extracting and profit-earning systems already in possession. The lag in modernization added greatly to the effects of increased productive efficiency in the disengagement of those vast masses of destitute unemployed and unemploying people which began to appear almost everywhere, like the morbid secretion of a diseased body, as the twentieth century passed into its third decade.”