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…
Section 8
As the Brissago council came to realise that what it had supposed
to be temporary camps of refugees were rapidly developing into
great towns of a new type, and that it was remoulding the world
in spite of itself, it decided to place this work of
redistributing the non-agricultural population in the hands of a
compactor and better qualified special committee. That committee
is now, far more than the council of any other of its delegated
committees, the active government of the world. Developed from
an almost invisible germ of 'town-planning' that came obscurely
into existence in Europe or America (the question is still in
dispute) somewhere in the closing decades of the nineteenth
century, its work, the continual active planning and replanning
of the world as a place of human habitation, is now so to speak
the collective material activity of the race. The spontaneous,
disorderly spreadings and recessions of populations, as aimless
and mechanical as the trickling of spilt water, which was the
substance of history for endless years, giving rise here to
congestions, here to chronic devastating wars, and everywhere to
a discomfort and disorderliness that was at its best only
picturesque, is at an end. Men spread now, with the whole power
of the race to aid them, into every available region of the
earth. Their cities are no longer tethered to running water and
the proximity of cultivation, their plans are no longer affected
by strategic considerations or thoughts of social insecurity. The
aeroplane and the nearly costless mobile car have abolished trade
routes; a common language and a universal law have abolished a
thousand restraining inconveniences, and so an astonishing
dispersal of habitations has begun. One may live anywhere. And
so it is that our cities now are true social gatherings, each
with a character of its own and distinctive interests of its own,
and most of them with a common occupation. They lie out in the
former deserts, these long wasted sun-baths of the race, they
tower amidst eternal snows, they hide in remote islands, and bask
on broad lagoons. For a time the whole tendency of mankind was to
desert the river valleys in which the race had been cradled for
half a million years, but now that the War against Flies has been
waged so successfully that this pestilential branch of life is
nearly extinct, they are returning thither with a renewed
appetite for gardens laced by watercourses, for pleasant living
amidst islands and houseboats and bridges, and for nocturnal
lanterns reflected by the sea.
Man who is ceasing to be an agricultural animal becomes more and
more a builder, a traveller, and a maker. How much he ceases to
be a cultivator of the soil the returns of the Redistribution
Committee showed. Every year the work of our scientific
laboratories increases the productivity and simplifies the labour
of those who work upon the soil, and the food now of the whole
world is produced by less than one per cent. of its population, a
percentage which still tends to decrease. Far fewer people are
needed upon the land than training and proclivity dispose towards
it, and as a consequence of this excess of human attention, the
garden side of life, the creation of groves and lawns and vast
regions of beautiful flowers, has expanded enormously and
continues to expand. For, as agricultural method intensifies and
the quota is raised, one farm association after another, availing
itself of the 1975 regulations, elects to produce a public garden
and pleasaunce in the place of its former fields, and the area of
freedom and beauty is increased. And the chemists' triumphs of
synthesis, which could now give us an entirely artificial food,
remain largely in abeyance because it is so much more pleasant
and interesting to eat natural produce and to grow such things
upon the soil. Each year adds to the variety of our fruits and
the delightfulness of our flowers.
Section 9
The early years of the World Republic witnessed a certain
recrudescence of political adventure. There was, it is rather
curious to note, no revival of separatism after the face of King
Ferdinand Charles had vanished from the sight of men, but in a
number of countries, as the first urgent physical needs were met,
there appeared a variety of personalities having this in common,
that they sought to revive political trouble and clamber by its
aid to positions of importance and satisfaction. In no case did
they speak in the name of kings, and it is clear that monarchy
must have been far gone in obsolescence before the twentieth
century began, but they made appeals to the large survivals of