From the first the new government handled affairs with a certain
greatness of spirit. Indeed, it was inevitable that they should act
greatly. From the first they had to see the round globe as one problem;
it was impossible any longer to deal with it piece by piece. They had
to secure it universally from any fresh outbreak of atomic destruction,
and they had to ensure a permanent and universal pacification. On this
capacity to grasp and wield the whole round globe their existence
depended. There was no scope for any further performance.
So soon as the seizure of the existing supplies of atomic ammunition
and the apparatus for synthesising Carolinum was assured, the
disbanding or social utilisation of the various masses of troops still
under arms had to be arranged, the salvation of the year’s harvests,
and the feeding, housing, and employment of the drifting millions of
homeless people. In Canada, in South America, and Asiatic Russia there
were vast accumulations of provision that was immovable only because of
the breakdown of the monetary and credit systems. These had to be
brought into the famine districts very speedily if entire depopulation
was to be avoided, and their transportation and the revival of
communications generally absorbed a certain proportion of the soldiery
and more able unemployed. The task of housing assumed gigantic
dimensions, and from building camps the housing committee of the
council speedily passed to constructions of a more permanent type. They
found far less friction than might have been expected in turning the
loose population on their hands to these things. People were
extraordinarily tamed by that year of suffering and death; they were
disillusioned of their traditions, bereft of once obstinate prejudices;
they felt foreign in a strange world, and ready to follow any confident
leadership. The orders of the new government came with the best of all
credentials, rations. The people everywhere were as easy to control,
one of the old labour experts who had survived until the new time
witnesses, ‘as gangs of emigrant workers in a new land.’ And now it was
that the social possibilities of the atomic energy began to appear. The
new machinery that had come into existence before the last wars
increased and multiplied, and the council found itself not only with
millions of hands at its disposal but 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 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 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....