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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 thousands;
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 with the party of the
temporisers, who were for putting little political men to control and
regulate the Food, and the party of reaction for whom Caterharn spoke,
speaking always with a more sinister ambiguity, crystallising his
intention first in one threatening phrase and then another, now that men
must "prune the bramble growths," now that they must find a "cure for
elephantiasis," and at last upon the eve of the election that they must
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