The World Set Free Page 19

  imagined need for tough and unintelligent soldiers and for a

  prolific class at a low level, prevented its systematic

  replacement at that time…

  And while this settlement of the country was in progress, the

  urban camps of the first phase of the council's activities were

  rapidly developing, partly through the inherent forces of the

  situation and partly through the council's direction, into a

  modern type of town…

  Section 7

  It is characteristic of the manner in which large enterprises

  forced themselves upon the Brissago council, that it was not

  until the end of the first year of their administration and then

  only with extreme reluctance that they would take up the manifest

  need for a lingua franca for the world. They seem to have given

  little attention to the various theoretical universal languages

  which were proposed to them. They wished to give as little

  trouble to hasty and simple people as possible, and the

  world-wide alstribution of English gave them a bias for it from

  the beginning. The extreme simplicity of its grammar was also in

  its favour.

  It was not without some sacrifices that the English-speaking

  peoples were permitted the satisfaction of hearing their speech

  used universally. The language was shorn of a number of

  grammatical peculiarities, the distinctive forms for the

  subjunctive mood for example and most of its irregular plurals

  were abolished; its spelling was systematised and adapted to the

  vowel sounds in use upon the continent of Europe, and a process

  of incorporating foreign nouns and verbs commenced that speedily

  reached enormous proportions. Within ten years from the

  establishment of the World Republic the New English Dictionary

  had swelled to include a vocabulary of 250,000 words, and a man

  of 1900 would have found considerable difficulty in reading an

  ordinary newspaper. On the other hand, the men of the new time

  could still appreciate the older English literature… Certain

  minor acts of uniformity accompanied this larger one. The idea of

  a common understanding and a general simplification of

  intercourse once it was accepted led very naturally to the

  universal establishment of the metric system of weights and

  measures, and to the disappearance of the various makeshift

  calendars that had hitherto confused chronology. The year was

  divided into thirteen months of four weeks each, and New Year's

  Day and Leap Year's Day were made holidays, and did not count at

  all in the ordinary week. So the weeks and the months were

  brought into correspondence. And moreover, as the king put it to

  Firmin, it was decided to 'nail down Easter.'… In these

  matters, as in so many matters, the new civilisation came as a

  simplification of ancient complications; the history of the

  calendar throughout the world is a history of inadequate

  adjustments, of attempts to fix seed-time and midwinter that go

  back into the very beginning of human society; and this final

  rectification had a symbolic value quite beyond its practical

  convenience. But the council would have no rash nor harsh

  innovations, no strange names for the months, and no alteration

  in the numbering of the years.

  The world had already been put upon one universal monetary basis.

  For some months after the accession of the council, the world's

  affairs had been carried on without any sound currency at all.

  Over great regions money was still in use, but with the most

  extravagant variations in price and the most disconcerting

  fluctuations of public confidence. The ancient rarity of gold

  upon which the entire system rested was gone. Gold was now a

  waste product in the release of atomic energy, and it was plain

  that no metal could be the basis of the monetary system again.

  Henceforth all coins must be token coins. Yet the whole world

  was accustomed to metallic money, and a vast proportion of

  existing human relationships had grown up upon a cash basis, and

  were almost inconceivable without that convenient liquidating

  factor. It seemed absolutely necessary to the life of the social

  organisation to have some sort of currency, and the council had

  therefore to discover some real value upon which to rest it.

  Various such apparently stable values as land and hours of work

  were considered. Ultimately the government, which was now in

  possession of most of the supplies of energy-releasing material,

  fixed a certain number of units of energy as the value of a gold

  sovereign, declared a sovereign to be worth exactly twenty marks,

  twenty-five francs, five dollars, and so forth, with the other

  current units of the world, and undertook, under various

  qualifications and conditions, to deliver energy upon demand as

  payment for every sovereign presented. On the whole, this worked

  satisfactorily. They saved the face of the pound sterling. Coin

  was rehabilitated, and after a phase of price fluctuations, began

  to settle down to definite equivalents and uses again, with names

  and everyday values familiar to the common run of people…

  Section 8

  As the Brissago council came to realise that what it had supposed

  to be temporary camps of refugees were rapidly developing into

  great towns of a new type, and that it was remoulding the world

  in spite of itself, it decided to place this work of

  redistributing the non-agricultural population in the hands of a

  compactor and better qualified special committee. That committee

  is now, far more than the council of any other of its delegated

  committees, the active government of the world. Developed from

  an almost invisible germ of 'town-planning' that came obscurely

  into existence in Europe or America (the question is still in

  dispute) somewhere in the closing decades of the nineteenth

  century, its work, the continual active planning and replanning

  of the world as a place of human habitation, is now so to speak

  the collective material activity of the race. The spontaneous,

  disorderly spreadings and recessions of populations, as aimless

  and mechanical as the trickling of spilt water, which was the

  substance of history for endless years, giving rise here to

  congestions, here to chronic devastating wars, and everywhere to

  a discomfort and disorderliness that was at its best only

  picturesque, is at an end. Men spread now, with the whole power

  of the race to aid them, into every available region of the

  earth. Their cities are no longer tethered to running water and

  the proximity of cultivation, their plans are no longer affected

  by strategic considerations or thoughts of social insecurity. The

  aeroplane and the nearly costless mobile car have abolished trade

  routes; a common language and a universal law have abolished a

  thousand restraining inconveniences, and so an astonishing

  dispersal of habitations has begun. One may live anywhere. And

  so it is that our cities now are true social gatherings, each

  with a character of its own and distinctive inter
ests of its own,

  and most of them with a common occupation. They lie out in the

  former deserts, these long wasted sun-baths of the race, they

  tower amidst eternal snows, they hide in remote islands, and bask

  on broad lagoons. For a time the whole tendency of mankind was to

  desert the river valleys in which the race had been cradled for

  half a million years, but now that the War against Flies has been

  waged so successfully that this pestilential branch of life is

  nearly extinct, they are returning thither with a renewed

  appetite for gardens laced by watercourses, for pleasant living

  amidst islands and houseboats and bridges, and for nocturnal

  lanterns reflected by the sea.

  Man who is ceasing to be an agricultural animal becomes more and

  more a builder, a traveller, and a maker. How much he ceases to

  be a cultivator of the soil the returns of the Redistribution

  Committee showed. Every year the work of our scientific

  laboratories increases the productivity and simplifies the labour

  of those who work upon the soil, and the food now of the whole

  world is produced by less than one per cent. of its population, a

  percentage which still tends to decrease. Far fewer people are

  needed upon the land than training and proclivity dispose towards

  it, and as a consequence of this excess of human attention, the

  garden side of life, the creation of groves and lawns and vast

  regions of beautiful flowers, has expanded enormously and

  continues to expand. For, as agricultural method intensifies and

  the quota is raised, one farm association after another, availing

  itself of the 1975 regulations, elects to produce a public garden

  and pleasaunce in the place of its former fields, and the area of

  freedom and beauty is increased. And the chemists' triumphs of

  synthesis, which could now give us an entirely artificial food,

  remain largely in abeyance because it is so much more pleasant

  and interesting to eat natural produce and to grow such things

  upon the soil. Each year adds to the variety of our fruits and

  the delightfulness of our flowers.

  Section 9

  The early years of the World Republic witnessed a certain

  recrudescence of political adventure. There was, it is rather

  curious to note, no revival of separatism after the face of King

  Ferdinand Charles had vanished from the sight of men, but in a

  number of countries, as the first urgent physical needs were met,

  there appeared a variety of personalities having this in common,

  that they sought to revive political trouble and clamber by its

  aid to positions of importance and satisfaction. In no case did

  they speak in the name of kings, and it is clear that monarchy

  must have been far gone in obsolescence before the twentieth

  century began, but they made appeals to the large survivals of

  nationalist and racial feeling that were everywhere to be found,

  they alleged with considerable justice that the council was

  overriding racial and national customs and disregarding religious

  rules. The great plain of India was particularly prolific in such

  agitators. The revival of newspapers, which had largely ceased

  during the terrible year because of the dislocation of the

  coinage, gave a vehicle and a method of organisation to these

  complaints. At first the council disregarded this developing

  opposition, and then it recognised it with an entirely

  devastating frankness.

  Never, of course, had there been so provisional a government. It

  was of an extravagant illegality. It was, indeed, hardly more

  than a club, a club of about a hundred persons. At the outset

  there were ninety-three, and these were increased afterwards by

  the issue of invitations which more than balanced its deaths, to

  as many at one time as one hundred and nineteen. Always its

  constitution has been miscellaneous. At no time were these

  invitations issued with an admission that they recognised a

  right. The old institution or monarchy had come out unexpectedly

  well in the light of the new regime. Nine of the original members

  of the first government were crowned heads who had resigned their

  separate sovereignty, and at no time afterwards did the number of

  its royal members sink below six. In their case there was perhaps

  a kind of attenuated claim to rule, but except for them and the

  still more infinitesimal pretensions of one or two ax-presidents

  of republics, no member of the council had even the shade of a

  right to his participation in its power. It was natural,

  therefore, that its opponents should find a common ground in a

  clamour for representative government, and build high hopes upon

  a return, to parliamentary institutions.

  The council decided to give them everything they wanted, but in a

  form that suited ill with their aspirations. It became at one

  stroke a representative body. It became, indeed, magnificently

  representative. It became so representative that the politicians

  were drowned in a deluge of votes. Every adult of either sex

  from pole to pole was given a vote, and the world was divided

  into ten constituencies, which voted on the same day by means of

  a simple modification of the world post. Membership of the

  government, it was decided, must be for life, save in the

  exceptional case of a recall; but the elections, which were held

  quinquenially, were arranged to add fifty members on each

  occasion. The method of proportional representation with one

  transferable vote was adopted, and the voter might also write

  upon his voting paper in a specially marked space, the name of

  any of his representatives that he wished to recall. A ruler was

  recallable by as many votes as the quota by which he had been

  elected, and the original members by as many votes in any

  constituency as the returning quotas in the first election.

  Upon these conditions the council submitted itself very

  cheerfully to the suffrages of the world. None of its members

  were recalled, and its fifty new associates, which included

  twenty-seven which it had seen fit to recommend, were of an

  altogether too miscellaneous quality to disturb the broad trend

  of its policy. Its freedom from rules or formalities prevented

  any obstructive proceedings, and when one of the two newly

  arrived Home Rule members for India sought for information how to

  bring in a bill, they learnt simply that bills were not brought

  in. They asked for the speaker, and were privileged to hear much

  ripe wisdom from the ex-king Egbert, who was now consciously

  among the seniors of the gathering. Thereafter they were baffled

  men…

  But already by that time the work of the council was drawing to

  an end. It was concerned not so much for the continuation of its

  construction as for the preservation of its accomplished work

  from the dramatic instincts of the politician.

  The life of the race becomes indeed more and more independent of

  the formal government. The council, in its opening phase, was

  heroic in spirit; a dragon-slaying body, i
t slashed out of

  existence a vast, knotted tangle of obsolete ideas and clumsy and

  jealous proprietorships; it secured by a noble system of

  institutional precautions, freedom of inquiry, freedom of

  criticism, free communications, a common basis of education and

  understanding, and freedom from economic oppression. With that

  its creative task was accomplished. It became more and more an

  established security and less and less an active intervention.

  There is nothing in our time to correspond with the continual

  petty making and entangling of laws in an atmosphere of

  contention that is perhaps the most perplexing aspect of

  constitutional history in the nineteenth century. In that age

  they seem to have been perpetually making laws when we should

  alter regulations. The work of change which we delegate to these

  scientific committees of specific general direction which have

  the special knowledge needed, and which are themselves dominated

  by the broad intellectual process of the community, was in those

  days inextricably mixed up with legislation. They fought over the

  details; we should as soon think of fighting over the arrangement

  of the parts of a machine. We know nowadays that such things go

  on best within laws, as life goes on between earth and sky. And

  so it is that government gathers now for a day or so in each year

  under the sunshine of Brissago when Saint Bruno's lilies are in

  flower, and does little more than bless the work of its

  committees. And even these committees are less originative and

  more expressive of the general thought than they were at first.

  It becomes difficult to mark out the particular directive

  personalities of the world. Continually we are less personal.

  Every goodthought contributes now, and every able brain falls

  within that informal and dispersed kingship which gathers

  together into one purpose the energies of the race.

  Section 10

  It is doubtful if we shall ever see again a phase of human

  existence in which 'politics,' that is to say a partisan

  interference with the ruling sanities of the world, will be the

  dominant interest among serious men. We seem to have entered

  upon an entirely new phase in history in which contention as

  distinguished from rivalry, has almost abruptly ceased to be the

  usual occupation, and has become at most a subdued and hidden and