with power and apparatus that made its first conceptions of the

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 capitalist system 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 currency system 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 progressive establishment 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 themselvesresponsible 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 constant contact 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 collective intelligence 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 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