4.5 KiB
CHAPTER THE FOURTH. THE NEW PHASE
Section 7
It is characteristic of the manner in which large enterprises forced themselves upon the Brissago council, that itwas not until the end of the first year of their administration and then only with extreme reluctance that theywould take up the manifest need for a lingua franca for the world. They seem to have given little attention to thevarious theoretical universal languages which were proposed to them. They wished to give as little trouble tohasty and simple people as possible, and the world−wide alstribution of English gave them a bias for it from thebeginning. 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 hearingtheir speech used universally. The language was shorn of a number of grammatical peculiarities, the distinctiveforms for the subjunctive mood for example and most of its irregular plurals were abolished; its spelling wassystematised and adapted to the vowel sounds in use upon the continent of Europe, and a process of incorporatingforeign nouns and verbs commenced that speedily reached enormous proportions. Within ten years from theestablishment of the World Republic the New English Dictionary had swelled to include a vocabulary of 250,000words, and a man of 1900 would have found considerable difficulty in reading an ordinary newspaper. On theother hand, the men of the new time could still appreciate the older English literature.... Certain minor acts ofuniformity accompanied this larger one. The idea of a common understanding and a general simplification ofintercourse once it was accepted led very naturally to the universal establishment of the metric system of weightsand 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 weremade holidays, and did not count at all in the ordinary week. So the weeks and the months were brought intocorrespondence. And moreover, as the king put it to Firmin, it was decided to 'nail down Easter.' . . . In thesematters, as in so many matters, the new civilisation came as a simplification of ancient complications; the historyof the calendar throughout the world is a history of inadequate adjustments, of attempts to fix seed−time andmidwinter that go back into the very beginning of human society; and this final rectification had a symbolic valuequite beyond its practical convenience. But the council would have no rash nor harsh innovations, no strangenames 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 thecouncil, the world's affairs had been carried on without any sound currency at all. Over great regions money wasstill in use, but with the most extravagant variations in price and the most disconcerting fluctuations of publicconfidence. The ancient rarity of gold upon which the entire system rested was gone. Gold was now a wasteproduct in the release of atomic energy, and it was plain that no metal could be the basis of the monetary systemagain. Henceforth all coins must be token coins. Yet the whole world was accustomed to metallic money, and avast proportion of existing human relationships had grown up upon a cash basis, and were almost inconceivablewithout that convenient liquidating factor. It seemed absolutely necessary to the life of the social organisation tohave 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 unitsof energy as the value of a gold sovereign, declared a sovereign to be worth exactly twenty marks, twenty−fivefrancs, five dollars, and so forth, with the other current units of the world, and undertook, under variousqualifications and conditions, to deliver energy upon demand as payment for every sovereign presented. On thewhole, this worked satisfactorily. They saved the face of the pound sterling. Coin was rehabilitated, and after a
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phase of price fluctuations, began to settle down to definite equivalents and uses again, with names and everydayvalues familiar to the common run of people....