work it had to do seem pitifully timid. The camps that were

planned in iron and deal were built in stone and brass; the roads
that were to have been mere iron tracks became spacious ways that

insisted upon architecture; the cultivations of foodstuffs that
were to have supplied emergency rations, were presently, with

synthesisers, fertilisers, actinic light, and scientific
direction, in excess of every human need.

The government had begun with the idea of temporarily
reconstituting the social and economic system that had prevailed

before the first coming of the atomic engine, because it was to
this system that the ideas and habits of the great mass of the

world's dispossessed population was adapted. Subsequent
rearrangement it had hoped to leave to its successors--whoever

they might be. But this, it became more and more manifest, was
absolutely impossible. As well might the council have proposed a

revival of slavery. The capitalistsystem had already been
smashed beyond repair by the onset of limitless gold and energy;

it fell to pieces at the first endeavour to stand it up again.
Already before the war half of the industrial class had been out

of work, the attempt to put them back into wages employment on
the old lines was futile from the outset--the absolute shattering

of the currencysystem alone would have been sufficient to
prevent that, and it was necessary therefore to take over the

housing, feeding, and clothing of this worldwide multitude
without exacting any return in labour whatever. In a little while

the mere absence of occupation for so great a multitude of people
everywhere became an evident social danger, and the government

was obliged to resort to such devices as simple decorative work
in wood and stone, the manufacture of hand-woven textiles,

fruit-growing, flower-growing, and landscape gardening on a grand
scale to keep the less adaptable out of mischief, and of paying

wages to the younger adults for attendance at schools that would
equip them to use the new atomic machinery.... So quite

insensibly the council drifted into a complete reorganisation of
urban and industrial life, and indeed of the entire social

system.
Ideas that are unhampered by political intrigue or financial

considerations have a sweeping way with them, and before a year
was out the records of the council show clearly that it was

rising to its enormous opportunity, and partly through its own
direct control and partly through a series of specific

committees, it was planning a new common social order for the
entire population of the earth. 'There can be no real social

stability or any general human happiness while large areas of the
world and large classes of people are in a phase of civilisation

different from the prevailing mass. It is impossible now to have
great blocks of population misunderstanding the generally

accepted social purpose or at an economic disadvantage to the
rest.' So the council expressed its conception of the problem it

had to solve. The peasant, the field-worker, and all barbaric
cultivators were at an 'economic disadvantage' to the more mobile

and educated classes, and the logic of the situation compelled
the council to take up systematically the supersession of this

stratum by a more efficient organisation of production. It
developed a scheme for the progressiveestablishment throughout

the world of the 'modern system' in agriculture, a system that
should give the full advantages of a civilised life to every

agricultural worker, and this replacement has been going on right
up to the present day. The central idea of the modern system is

the substitution of cultivating guilds for the individual
cultivator, and for cottage and village life altogether. These

guilds are associations of men and women who take over areas of
arable or pasture land, and make themselves responsible for a

certain average produce. They are bodies small enough as a rule
to be run on a strictly democratic basis, and large enough to

supply all the labour, except for a certain assistance from
townspeople during the harvest, needed upon the land farmed. They

have watchers' bungalows or chalets on the ground cultivated, but
the ease and the costlessness of modern locomotion enables them

to maintain a group of residences in the nearest town with a
common dining-room and club house, and usually also a guild house

in the national or provincial capital. Already this system has
abolished a distinctively 'rustic' population throughout vast

areas of the old world, where it has prevailed immemorially. That
shy, unstimulated life of the lonely hovel, the narrow scandals

and petty spites and persecutions of the small village, that
hoarding, half inanimate existence away from books, thought, or

social participation and in constantcontact with cattle, pigs,
poultry, and their excrement, is passing away out of human

experience. In a little while it will be gone altogether. In the
nineteenth century it had already ceased to be a necessary human

state, and only the absence of any collectiveintelligence and an
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" target="_blank" title="a.特有的 n.特性">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 extremereluctance 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 extremesimplicity 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 enormousproportions. 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

universalestablishment 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 universalmonetary 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