The Sirian Experiments Read Online Free PDF Page A

be used at all.
    This realization affected some of our administrative people badly, resulting in depressions and psychological maladjustments of all kinds.
    The populations everywhere, on every one of our planets, were drastically, but carefully reduced; while the philosophical aspects of the matter were left, temporarily, to the intellectuals.
    There was a very long period while this was being done when there were blocs of vast numbers of people who had no occupation, and for whom occupation was made. This fact, too, is relevant to what follows.
    Meanwhile, there were extraordinary and bizarre contradictions to be observed everywhere.
    The idea of ourselves, not only on the Home Planet but everywhere, as people who had evolved beyond certain levels made it impossible for them to be asked to do some kinds of work.
    I did not mention in the list of classes of work that had still to be done by people and not machines, some kinds of heavy manual labour, for which we had not found technical substitutes. Without using force, it was not possible to get any of our peoples to undertake these. In the early heady days of euphoria when we were so effortlessly and successfully – it seemed – surmounting every kind of technical obstacle, abolishing one by one the different classes of unpleasant and degrading work – so we called it – intensive propaganda had gone into adjusting and setting the minds of populations accordingly. When we reversed, or were prepared to adjust, our thinking, it was too late. It is easy for a skilled administrative class to change the ways of thinking ofpopulations, but not easy to do it fast – not without all kinds of social upheaval. We found ourselves in the ludicrous situation where, with hundreds of millions of ‘surplus’ people, we did not know where to find enough ordinary labourers.
    We had evolved beyond using force: Canopus had shown us this path long ago. (By this I mean the use of larger numbers of people, under duress, for tasks they found abhorrent or demeaning. This did not mean that we did not conscript for work that everyone agreed to find interesting – such as the Colonial Service.) It was not possible for us simply to round up the numbers we needed for mining, quarrying, building and so on, and then turn them into a prison population to do society’s dirty work.
    In the preceding remarks to do with our condition during that time, I have not yet done more than mention the space drive, which was the greater part of our development – indeed, the motor that governed all our technical development.
    Our crisis had its own built-in solution from the beginning. It was to increase our space fleets, our space personnel, our programme for the conquest of space. Our situation was not a static one, not self-limited. Though it certainly did have its limits: the war with Canopus was a result of this sudden restless drive outwards. The devastation caused, the vast numbers killed, certainly solved, or postponed, some problems. I am speaking now dispassionately, and without submission to sentimental considerations: it had not been our intention to use this way of reducing our surplus populations – but that was the result; not our intention to ruin whole planets, so that much labour would be needed to repair them – but that was what happened. These were the
facts.
But the inherent productivity and resources of our Empire were such that all this damage was soon and easily – looking at it from a long-term view – put right. The real lesson of this war was that we were not to be allowed to trespass on Canopean territory. Certain parts of the Galaxy were out of bounds. This meant that the planets available to us, at our then level oftechnical achievement, were limited: we had already conquered, or at least surveyed, them all. What was necessary was an expansion of our space technology so that greater areas of the Galaxy would become open to us. This is