The need for social security in the postwar world.

I T WOULD BE a very presumptuous person who would pretend to be able to predict the exact future development of what we in this country have come to call social security. I t s development depends first of all upon what kind of a postwar world we shall have. Of one thing we can be certain. I t will be a world of intensive, extensive, and rapid change—not only technological change but political, economic, and social change as well. We are not yet able to grasp even dimly the t r e mendous implications of the atomic bomb. While its technological implications stagger the imagination, its political, economic, and social implications are even more tremendous. But I do not propose to discuss the atomic bomb. Even if the atomic bomb had never been discovered, this war tha t we have just fought has released psychological forces which, when coupled with widespread human misery and want, have set off "chain r e actions" literally world-wide in their extent. I refer to what you probably will say are very old concepts of liberty, democracy, and equal opportunity. I t is t rue t h a t these concepts are not new in the western world, but they have never before been given global currency and application. The peoples in the far corners of the world have now become keenly aware of them and apparently are proposing to act accordingly. I t took hundreds of years for the rise and fall of ancient empires. A few decades can span the rise and fall of modern empires. As a mat te r of fact, the mode of existence of the common man was very much the same for thousands of years until a little over 150 years ago, when technologi-