But that is our local problem, and it is for us to struggle with it. Sometimes, it is true, I have felt that the Venetian shadow falls over the entire West. I have felt that on the other side of the Mississippi. In more resilient moments, I comfort myself that Americans are much more like us between 1850 and 1914. Whatever they don't do, they do react. It's going to take them a long and violent pull to be as well prepared for the scientific revolution as the Russians are, but there are good chances that they will do it.

Nevertheless, that isn't the main issue of the scientific revolution. The main issue is that the people in the industriahsed countries are getting richer, and those in the non-industrialised countries are at best standing still: so that the gap between the industriahsed countries and the rest is widening every day. On the world scale this is the gap between the rich and the poor.

Among the rich are the U.S., the white Commonwealth countries, Great Britain, most of Europe, and the U.S.S.R. China is betwixt and between, not yet over the industrial hump, but probably getting there. The poor are all the rest. In the rich countries people are living longer, eating better, working less. In a poor country like India, the expectation of life is less than half what it is in England.