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 IV

That had been in the boyhood of the Sons, but now they were nearly men. And the chains had been tightening upon them and tightening with every year of growth. Each year they grew and the Food spread and great things multiplied, each year the stress and tension rose. The Food had been at first for the great mass of mankind a distant marvel, and now it was coming home to every threshold and threatening, pressing against and distorting the whole order of life. It blocked this, it overturned that, it changed natural products, and by changing natural products it stopped employments and threw men out of work by the hundred thousand; it swept over boundaries and turned the world of trade into a world of cataclysms; no wonder mankind hated it.

And since it is easier to hate animate than inanimate things, animals more than plants, and one's fellow men more completely than any animals, the fear and trouble engendered by giant nettles and six-foot grass blades, awful insects and tiger-like vermin, grew all into one great power of detestation that aimed itself with a simple directness at that scattered band of great human beings, the Children of the Food. That hatred had become the central force in political affairs. The old party lines had been traversed and effaced altogether under the insistence of these newer issues, and the conflict lay now between the party of the temporisers, who were for setting little political men to control and regulate the Food, and the party of reaction, for whom Caterham spoke,