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The World Set Free-Part25_H. G. WELLS (1866-1946)_English Literature(文学名著)-第2页

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



waste product in the release of atomicenergy, and it was plain

that no metal could be the basis of the monetarysystem 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 apparentlystable 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 interests 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 amidsteternal 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






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