## CHAPTER THE FOURTH. THE NEW PHASE

### Section 6

From the first the new government handled affairs with a certain greatness of spirit. Indeed, it was inevitable thatthey should act greatly. From the first they had to see the round globe as one problem; it was impossible anylonger to deal with it piece by piece. They had to secure it universally from any fresh outbreak of atomicdestruction, and they had to ensure a permanent and universal pacification. On this capacity to grasp and wield thewhole 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 synthesisingCarolinum was assured, the disbanding or social utilisation of the various masses of troops still under arms had tobe arranged, the salvation of the year's harvests, and the feeding, housing, and employment of the drifting millionsof homeless people. In Canada, in South America, and Asiatic Russia there were vast accumulations of provisionthat was immovable only because of the breakdown of the monetary and credit systems. These had to be broughtinto the famine districts very speedily if entire depopulation was to be avoided, and their transportation and therevival 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 councilspeedily passed to constructions of a more permanent type. They found far less friction than might have beenexpected in turning the loose population on their hands to these things. People were extraordinarily tamed by thatyear of suffering and death; they were disillusioned of their traditions, bereft of once obstinate prejudices; theyfelt foreign in a strange world, and ready to follow any confident leadership. The orders of the new governmentcame with the best of all credentials, rations. The people everywhere were as easy to control, one of the old labour
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experts who had survived until the new time witnesses, 'as gangs of emigrant workers in a new land.' And now itwas that the social possibilities of the atomic energy began to appear. The new machinery that had come intoexistence before the last wars increased and multiplied, and the council found itself not only with millions ofhands at its disposal but with power and apparatus that made its first conceptions of the work it had to do seempitifully timid. The camps that were planned in iron and deal were built in stone and brass; the roads that were tohave been mere iron tracks became spacious ways that insisted upon architecture; the cultivations of foodstuffsthat were to have supplied emergency rations, were presently, with synthesisers, fertilisers, actinic light, andscientific direction, in excess of every human need.
The government had begun with the idea of temporarily reconstituting the social and economic system that hadprevailed before the first coming of the atomic engine, because it was to this system that the ideas and habits ofthe great mass of the world's dispossessed population was adapted. Subsequent rearrangement it had hoped toleave to its successors−−whoever they might be. But this, it became more and more manifest, was absolutelyimpossible. As well might the council have proposed a revival of slavery. The capitalist system had already beensmashed beyond repair by the onset of limitless gold and energy; it fell to pieces at the first endeavour to stand itup again. Already before the war half of the industrial class had been out of work, the attempt to put them backinto wages employment on the old lines was futile from the outset−−the absolute shattering of the currencysystem 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 whilethe 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, themanufacture of hand−woven textiles, fruit−growing, flower−growing, and landscape gardening on a grand scaleto keep the less adaptable out of mischief, and of paying wages to the younger adults for attendance at schoolsthat would equip them to use the new atomic machinery.... So quite insensibly the council drifted into a completereorganisation 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, andbefore a year was out the records of the council show clearly that it was rising to its enormous opportunity, andpartly through its own direct control and partly through a series of specific committees, it was planning a newcommon social order for the entire population of the earth. 'There can be no real social stability or any generalhuman happiness while large areas of the world and large classes of people are in a phase of civilisation differentfrom the prevailing mass. It is impossible now to have great blocks of population misunderstanding the generallyaccepted social purpose or at an economic disadvantage to the rest.' So the council expressed its conception of theproblem it had to solve. The peasant, the field−worker, and all barbaric cultivators were at an 'economicdisadvantage' to the more mobile and educated classes, and the logic of the situation compelled the council to takeup systematically the supersession of this stratum by a more efficient organisation of production. It developed ascheme for the progressive establishment throughout the world of the 'modern system' in agriculture, a system thatshould give the full advantages of a civilised life to every agricultural worker, and this replacement has beengoing on right up to the present day. The central idea of the modern system is the substitution of cultivating guildsfor the individual cultivator, and for cottage and village life altogether. These guilds are associations of men andwomen who take over areas of arable or pasture land, and make themselves responsible for a certain averageproduce. They are bodies small enough as a rule to be run on a strictly democratic basis, and large enough tosupply all the labour, except for a certain assistance from townspeople during the harvest, needed upon the landfarmed. They have watchers' bungalows or chalets on the ground cultivated, but the ease and the costlessness ofmodern locomotion enables them to maintain a group of residences in the nearest town with a commondining−room and club house, and usually also a guild house in the national or provincial capital. Already thissystem has abolished a distinctively 'rustic' population throughout vast areas of the old world, where it hasprevailed immemorially. That shy, unstimulated life of the lonely hovel, the narrow scandals and petty spites andpersecutions of the small village, that hoarding, half inanimate existence away from books, thought, or socialparticipation and in constant contact with cattle, pigs, poultry, and their excrement, is passing away out of humanexperience. In a little while it will be gone altogether. In the nineteenth century it had already ceased to be a
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necessary human state, and only the absence of any collective intelligence and an imagined need for tough andunintelligent 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'sactivities were rapidly developing, partly through the inherent forces of the situation and partly through thecouncil's direction, into a modern type of town....