The men in the other professions were not able to step back and observe.
If some men found themselves leaving their farms for a chance to work in a
factory, that was all they knew. If their children now had a chance to survive
beyond the age of ten (child mortality had been about fifty percent in the
pre-capitalist era), they were not able to identify the cause. They could not
tell why the periodic famines—that had been striking every twenty years to
wipe out the “surplus” population which pre-capitalist economies could not
feed—now came to an end, as did the carnages of religious wars, nor why
fear seemed to be lifting away from people’s voices and from the streets of
growing cities, nor why an enormous exultation was suddenly sweeping the
world. The intellectuals did not choose to tell them
