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
nationalist and racial feeling that were everywhere to be found,
they alleged with considerable justice that the council was
overriding racial and national customs and disregarding religious
rules. The great plain of India was particularly prolific in such
agitators. The revival of newspapers, which had largely ceased
during the terrible year because of the dislocation of the
coinage, gave a vehicle and a method of organisation to these
complaints. At first the council disregarded this developing
opposition, and then it recognised it with an entirely
devastating frankness.
Never, of course, had there been so provisional a government. It
was of an extravagant illegality. It was, indeed, hardly more
than a club, a club of about a hundred persons. At the outset
there were ninety-three, and these were increased afterwards by
the issue of invitations which more than balanced its deaths, to
as many at one time as one hundred and nineteen. Always its
constitution has been miscellaneous. At no time were these
invitations issued with an admission that they recognised a
right. The old institution or monarchy had come out unexpectedly
well in the light of the new regime. Nine of the original members
of the first government were crowned heads who had resigned their
separate sovereignty, and at no time afterwards did the number of
its royal members sink below six. In their case there was perhaps
a kind of attenuated claim to rule, but except for them and the
still more infinitesimal pretensions of one or two ax-presidents
of republics, no member of the council had even the shade of a
right to his participation in its power. It was natural,
therefore, that its opponents should find a common ground in a
clamour for representative government, and build high hopes upon
a return, to parliamentary institutions.
The council decided to give them everything they wanted, but in a
form that suited ill with their aspirations. It became at one
stroke a representative body. It became, indeed, magnificently
representative. It became so representative that the politicians
were drowned in a deluge of votes. Every adult of either sex
from pole to pole was given a vote, and the world was divided
into ten constituencies, which voted on the same day by means of
a simple modification of the world post. Membership of the
government, it was decided, must be for life, save in the
exceptional case of a recall; but the elections, which were held
quinquenially, were arranged to add fifty members on each
occasion. The method of proportional representation with one