§ 6
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. . .
.