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 distribution 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....