§ 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 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. . . .