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 themselvesresponsible 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…
Section 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…
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