 Chapter 4 of The World Set Free by H.G. Wells. Chapter 4. The New Phase. Section 1. The task that lay before the assembly of Brasago, viewed as we may view it now from the clarifying standpoint of things accomplished, was in its broad issues a simple one. Essentially, it was to place social organization upon the new footing that the swift accelerated advance of human knowledge had rendered necessary. The council was gathered together, with the haste of a salvage expedition, and it was confronted with wreckage, but the wreckage was irreparable wreckage, and the only possibilities of the case were either the relapse of mankind to the agricultural barbarism from which it had emerged so painfully, or the acceptance of achieved science as the basis of a new social order. The old tendencies of human nature, suspicion, jealousy, particularism, and belligerency were incompatible with the monstrous destructive power of the new appliances of the inhuman logic of science had produced. The equilibrium could be restored only by civilization destroying itself down to a level at which modern apparatus could no longer be produced, or by human nature adapting itself in its institutions to the new conditions. It was for the latter alternative that the assembly existed. Sooner or later, this choice would have confronted mankind. The sudden development of atomic science did but precipitate and render rapid a dramatic clash between the new and the customary that had been gathering since ever the first flint was chipped or the first fire built together. From the day when man contrived himself a tool and suffered another male to draw near him, he ceased to be altogether a thing of instinct and untroubled convictions. From that day forth, a widening breach can be traced between his egotistical passions and the social need. Slowly he adapted himself to the life of the homestead, and his passionate impulses widened out to the demands of the clan and the tribe. But widened though his impulses might, the latent hunter and wanderer and wanderer in his imagination outstripped their development. He was never quite subdued to the soil nor quite tame to the home. Everywhere it needed teaching and the priest to keep him within the bounds of the plow life and the beast tending. Slowly a vast system of traditional imperatives superposed itself upon his instincts. Imperatives that were admirably fitted to make him that cultivator, that cattle mincer, who was for twice ten thousand years the normal man. And, unpremeditated, undesired, out of the accumulations of his tilling came civilization. Civilization was the agricultural surplus. It appeared as trade and tracks and roads. It pushed boats out upon the rivers and presently invaded the seas. And within its primitive courts, within temples grown rich and leisurely, amidst the gathering medley of the seaport towns, rose speculation and philosophy and science. In the beginning of the new order that has at last established itself as human life. Slowly at first, as we traced it, and then within accumulating velocity, the new powers were fabricated. Man as a whole did not seek them nor desire them. They were thrust into his hand. For a time, men took up and used these new things and the new powers inadvertently as they came to him, wrecking nothing of the consequences. For endless generations, change led him very gently, but when he had been led far enough, change quickened the pace. It was with a series of shocks that he realized at last that he was living the old life less and less in a new life more and more. Already before the release of atomic energy, the tensions between the old way of living and the new were intense. They were far intenser than they had been even at the collapse of the Roman imperial system. On the one hand was the ancient life of the family and the small community and the petty industry. And on the other was a new life on a larger scale, with remoder horizons and a strange sense of purpose. Already it was growing clear that men must live on one side or the other. One could not have had little tradespeople and syndicated businesses in the same market, sleeping carters and motor trolleys on the same road, bows and arrows and airplane sharpshooters in the same army, or illiterate peasant industries and power driven factories in the same world. And still less it was possible that one could have the ideas and ambitions and greed and jealousy of peasants equipped with the vast appliances of the new age. If there had been no atomic bombs to bring together most of the directing intelligence of the world to that hasty conference at Brasago, there would have still been, extended over great areas and a considerable space of time perhaps, a less formal conference of responsible and understanding people upon the perplexities of this worldwide opposition. If the work of Holston had been spread over centuries and imparted to the world by imperceptible degrees, it would nevertheless have made it necessary for men to take counsel upon and set a plan for the future. Indeed already there had been accumulating for a hundred years before the crisis a literature of foresight. There was a whole mass of modern state scheming available for the conference to go upon. These bombs did but accentuate and dramatize an already developing problem. Section 2 This assembly was no leap of exceptional minds and superintelligence into the control of affairs. It was teachable, its members trailed ideas with them to the gathering, but these were the consequences of the moral shock the bombs had given humanity, and there is no reason for supposing its individual personalities were greatly above the average. It would be possible to cite a thousand instances of error and inefficiency in its proceedings due to the forgetfulness, irritability, or fatigue of its members. It experimented considerably and blundered often, accepting Holston, whose gift was highly specialized, it is questionable whether there was a single man of the first order of human quality in the gathering, but it had a modest fear of itself and a consequent directness that gave it a general distinction. There was, of course, a noble simplicity about Leblanc, but even of him it may be asked whether he was not rather good and honest-minded than in the fuller sense great. The ex-king had wisdom and a certain romantic dash. He was a man among thousands, even if he was not a man among millions, but his memoirs, and indeed his decision to write memoirs, gave the quality of himself and his associates. The book makes admirable but astonishing reading. Therein he takes the great work the council was doing for granted, as a little child takes God. It is as if he had no sense of it at all. He tells amusing trivialities about his cousin Wilhelm and his secretary Firmin. He pokes fun at the American president, who was indeed rather a little accident of the political machine than a representative American. And he gives a long description of how he was lost for three days in the mountains, in the company of the only Japanese member, a loss that seems to have caused no serious interruption of the work of the council. The Bursago Conference has been written about time after time, as though it were a gathering of the very flower of humanity. Perched up there by the freak or wisdom of Leblanc, it had a certain Olympian quality and the natural tendency of the human mind to elaborate such a resemblance would have give us its members the likenesses of gods. It would be equally reasonable to compare it to one of those enforced meetings upon the mountaintops that must have occurred in the opening phases of the deluge. The strength of the council lay not in itself, but in the circumstances that had quickened its intelligence, dispelled its vanities, and emancipated it from traditional ambitions and antagonisms. It was stripped of the accumulation of centuries, a naked government with all that freedom of action that nakedness affords, and its problems were set before it with a plainness that was out of all comparison with the complicated and perplexing intimations of the former time. Section 3 The world on which the council looked did indeed present a task quite sufficiently immense and altogether too urgent for any wants and indulgence in internal dissension. It may be interesting to sketch in a few phrases the condition of mankind at the close of the period of warring states in the year of crisis that followed the release of atomic power. It was a world extraordinarily limited when one measures it by later standards, and it was now in a state of the direst confusion and distress. It must be remembered that at this time men had still to spread into enormous areas of the land surface of the globe. There were vast mountain wildernesses, forest wildernesses, sandy deserts, and foreign lands. Men still clung closely to water and arable soil in temperate or subtropic climates. They lived abundantly only in river valleys, and all their great cities had grown upon large navigable rivers or close to ports upon the sea. Over great areas, even of this suitable land, flies and mosquitoes armed with infection had so far defeated human invasion, and under their protection the virgin forests remained untouched. Indeed, the whole world even in its most crowded districts was filthy with flies and swarming with needless insect life to an extent which is now almost incredible. A population map of the world in 1950 would have followed seashore and river courses so closely in its darker shading as to give an impression that Homo sapiens was an amphibious animal. His roads and railways lay also along the lower contours, only here and there to pierce some mountain barrier or reach some holiday resort did they clamber above 3,000 feet. And across the ocean, his traffic passed in definite lines. There were hundreds of thousands of square miles of ocean no ship ever traversed except by misschance. Into the mysteries of the solid globe under his feet, he had not yet pierced for 5 miles, and it was still not 40 years since. With a tragic pertinacity, he had climbed to the poles of the earth. The limitless mineral wealth of the arctic and Antarctic circles was still buried beneath vast accumulations of immemorial ice. And the secret riches of the inner zones of the crust were untapped and indeed unsuspected. The higher mountain regions were known only to a sprinkling of guide-led climbers and the frequenters of a few gaunt hotels, and the vast rainless belts of land that lay across continental masses from Gobi to Sahara and along the backbone of America. With their perfect air, their daily baths of blazing sunshine, their nights of cool serenity and glowing stars, and their reservoirs of deep-lying water were as yet only desolations of fear and death to the common imagination. And now under the shock of the atomic bombs, the great masses of population, which had gathered into the enormous dingy town centers of that period, were dispossessed and scattered disastrously over the surrounding rural areas. It was as if some brutal force, grown impatient at last at man's blindness, had with the deliberate intention of a rearrangement of population upon more wholesome lines shaken the world. The great industrial regions and the large cities that had escaped the bombs were, because of their complete economic collapse, in almost as tragic a plight as those that blazed, and the countryside was disordered by a multitude of wandering and lawless strangers. In some parts of the world famine raged. In many regions there was plague, the plains of North India, which had become more and more dependent for the general welfare on the railways and that great system of irrigation canals which the malignant section of the patriots had destroyed. We're in a state of peculiar distress. Whole villages lay dead together, no man heeding. And the very tigers and panthers that preyed upon the emaciated survivors, crawled back infected into the jungle to perish. Large areas of China were a prey to brigand bands. It is a remarkable thing that no complete contemporary account of the explosion of the atomic bombs survived. There are, of course, innumerable illusions and partial records, and it is from these that subsequent ages must pierce together the image of these devastations. The phenomena, it must be remembered, changed greatly from day to day, and even from hour to hour, as the exploding bomb shifted its position, threw off fragments or came into contact with water or a fresh texture of soil. Barnet, who came within 40 miles of Paris early in October, is concerned chiefly with his account of the social confusion of the countryside and the problems of his command, but he speaks of heaped cloud masses of steam, all along the sky to the southwest, and of a red glare beneath these at night. Parts of Paris were still burning, and numbers of people were camped in the fields even at this distance watching over treasured heaps of salvaged loot. He speaks, too, of the distant rumbling of the explosion, like trains going over iron bridges. The other descriptions agree with this. They all speak of the continuous reverberations of the thuttering and hammering, or some such phrase, and they all testify to a huge pall of steam from which rain would fall suddenly in torrents and amidst which lightning played. Donning nearer to Paris, an observer would have found the salvaged camps increasing in number and blocking up the villages, and large numbers of people, often starving and ailing, camping under improvised tents because there was no place for them to go. The sky became more and more densely overcast, until at last it blotted out the light of day and left nothing but a dull red glare, extraordinarily depressing to the spirit. In this dull glare, great numbers of people were still living, clinging to their houses and in many cases subsisting in a state of partial famine upon the produce in their gardens and the stores in the shops of the provision dealers. Coming in still closer, the investigator would have reached the police cordon, which was trying to check the desperate enterprise of those who would return to their homes or rescue their more valuable possessions within the zone of imminent danger. That zone was rather arbitrarily defined. If our spectator could have gotten permission to enter it, he would have entered also a zone of uproar, a zone of perpetual thunderings lit by a strange purpleish red light and quivering and swaying with the incessant explosion of the radioactive substance. Whole blocks of buildings were light and burning fiercely, the trembling, ragged flames looking pale and ghastly and attenuated in comparison with the full-bodied crimson glare beyond. The shells of other edifices already burnt rose, pierced by rows of window sockets against the red-lit mist. Every step farther would have been as dangerous as a descent within the crater of an active volcano. These spinning, boiling bomb centers would shift or break unexpectedly into new regions, new fragments of earth or drain or masonry, sudden caught by a jet of disruptive force, might come flying by the explorer's head. Or the ground yawn a fiery grave beneath his feet. Few who adventured into these areas of destruction and survived attempted any repetition of their experiences. There are stories of puffs of luminous radioactive vapor drifting sometimes scores of miles from the bomb center and killing and scorching all they overtook. At first the conflagrations from the Paris Center spread westward halfway to the sea. Moreover, the air in this infernal inner circle of red-lit ruins had a peculiar dryness and a blistering quality so that it set up a soreness of the skin and lungs that was very difficult to heal. Such was the last state of Paris and such on a larger scale was a condition of affairs in Chicago and the same fate had overtaken Berlin, Moscow, Tokyo, the eastern half of London, Toulon, Kiel and 218 other centers of population or armament. Such was a flaming center of radiant destruction that only time could quench that indeed in many instances time has still to quench. To this day, though indeed with a constantly diminishing uproar and vigor, these explosions continue. In the map of nearly every country of the world three or four or more red circles, a score of miles in diameter is the position of the dying atomic bombs and the death areas that men have been forced to abandon around them. Within these are perished museums, cathedrals, palaces, libraries, galleries of masterpieces, and a vast accumulation of human achievement whose charred remains lie buried, a legacy of curious material that only future generations may hope to examine. Section 4 The state of mind of the dispossessed urban population which swarmed and perished so abundantly over the countryside during the dark days of the autumnal months that followed the last war, was one of blank despair. Barnet gives sketch after sketch of groups of these people cramped among the vineyards of champagne as he saw them during his period of service in the army of pacification. There was, for example, that man milliner who came out from a field beside the road that rises up eastward out of Epernai and asks how things were going in Paris. He was, says Barnet, a round-faced man dressed very neatly in black. So neatly that it was amazing to discover he was living close at hand in a tent made of carpets and he had an urbane but insistent manner, a carefully trimmed mustache and beard, expressive eyebrows, and hair very neatly brushed. No one goes into Paris, said Barnet, but Monturre, that is very un-enterprising. The man by the wayside submitted, the danger is too great, the radiations eat into people's skins. The eyebrows protested, but is nothing to be done? Nothing can be done. But Monturre, it is extraordinarily inconvenient, just living in exile and waiting. My wife and little boy suffer extremely. There is a lack of amenity and the season advances. I say nothing of the expense and difficulty in obtaining provisions. When does Monturre think that something will be done to render Paris possible? Barnet considered his interlocutor. I'm told, said Barnet, that Paris is not likely to be possible again for several generations. Oh, but this is preposterous. Consider Monturre. What are people like ourselves to do in the meanwhile? I am a costumer. All my connections and interests, above all my style, demand Paris. Barnet considered the sky, from which a light rain was beginning to fall, the wide fields about them, from which the harvest had been taken, the trim poplars by the wayside. Naturally, he agreed, you want to go to Paris, but Paris is over. Over. Finished. But then, Monturre, what is to become of me? Barnet turned his face westward, wither the white road lead. Where else, for example, may I hope to find opportunity? Barnet made no reply. Perhaps on the Riviera, some such place as Hamburg, or some plague perhaps. All that, said Barnet, accepting for the first time facts that had lain evident in his mind for weeks, all that must be over too. There was a pause. Then the voice beside him broke out. But Monturre, it is impossible. It leaves, nothing. No, not very much. One cannot suddenly begin to grow potatoes. It would be good if Monturre could bring himself to the life of a peasant, and my wife. You do not know the distinguished delicacy of my wife, a refined helplessness, a peculiar depended charm, like some slender tropical creeper, with great white flowers. But all this is foolish talk. It is impossible that Paris, which has survived so many misfortunes, should not presently revive. I do not think it will ever revive. Paris is finished. London too, I am told. Berlin. All the great capitals were stricken. But Monturre must permit me to differ. It is so. It is impossible. All civilizations do not end in this manner. Mankind will insist. On Paris? On Paris. Monturre, you might as well hope to go down the maelstrom and resume business there. I am content, Monturre, with my own faith. The winter comes on. Would not Monturre be wiser to seek a house? Farther from Paris? No, Monturre. It is not possible, Monturre, what you say, and you are under a tremendous mistake. Indeed you are in error. I ask merely for information. When I last saw him, said Barnet, he was standing under the signpost at the crest of the hill, gazing wistfully. Yet it seemed to me a little doubtfully, now towards Paris, an altogether heedless of a drizzling rain leading him through and through. Section 5 This effect of Childus May, of a doom as yet imperfectly apprehended, deepens as Barnet's record passes on to tell of the approach of winter. It was too much for the great mass of those unwilling and incompetent nomads to realize that an age had ended, that the old help and guidance existed no longer, that times would not mend again, however patiently they held out. They were still in many cases looking to Paris when the first snowflakes of that pitiless January came swirling about them. The story grows grimmer. If it is less monstrously tragic after Barnet's return to England, it is, if anything, harder. England was a spectacle of fear-embittered householders hiding food, crushing out robbery, driving the starving wanderers from every faltering place upon the roads, lest they should die inconveniently, and reproachfully on the doorsteps of those who had failed to urge them onward. The remnants of the British troops left France finally in march. After urgent representations from the provisional government at Orlan's, thought they could be supported no longer. They seem to have been a fairly well-behaved but highly parasitic force throughout, though Barnet is clearly of opinion that they did much to suppress sporadic brighandage and maintain social order. He came home to a famine-stricken country, and his picture of the England of that spring is one of miserable patience and desperate expedience. The country was suffering much more than France because of the cessation of the overseas supplies on which it had hitherto relied. His troops were given bread, dried fish, and boiled nettles at Dover, and marched inland to Ashford and paid off. On the way thither, they saw four men hanging from the telegraph posts by the roadside who had been hung for stealing Swedes. The labour-refuges of Kent, he discovered, were feeding their crowds of casual wanderers unbred into which clay and sawdust had been mixed. In Surrey there was a shortage of even such fare as that. He himself struck a cross-country to Winchester, fearing to approach the bomb-poison district round London, and at Winchester he had the luck to be taken on as one of the wireless assistants at the central station and given regular rations. The station stood in a commanding position on the Chalk Hill that overlooks the town from the east. Thence he must have assisted in the transmission of the endless cipher messages that preceded the gathering at Brassago, and there was that the Brassago proclamation of the end of the war and the establishment of a world government came under his hands. He was feeling ill and apathetic that day and he did not realize what it was he was transcribing. He did it mechanically as a part of his tedious duty. Afterwards there came a rush of messages arising out of the declaration that strained him very much and in the evening when he was relieved his scanty supper and then went out upon the little balcony before the station to smoke and rest his brains after this sudden and yet inexplicable press of duty. It was a very beautiful, still evening. He fell talking to a fellow operator and for the first time he declares I began to understand what it was all about. I began to see just what enormous issues had been under my hands for the past four hours but I became incredulous after my first stimulation. This is some sort of bunkum, I said very sagely. My colleague was more hopeful. It means an end to bomb throwing and destruction, he said. It means that presently corn will come from America. Who is going to send corn when there is no more value and money? I asked. Suddenly we were startled by a clashing from the town below. The cathedral bells, which had been silent ever since I had come into the district, were beginning with a sort of rheumatic difficulty to ring. Presently they warmed a little to the work and we realized what was going on. They were ringing appeal. We listened with an unbelieving astonishment and looking into each other's yellow faces. They mean it, said my colleague. But what can they do now? I asked. Everything is broken down. And on that sentence, with an unexpected artistry Barnet abruptly ends his story. Section 6 From the first, the new government handled affairs with a certain greatness of spirit. Indeed, it was inevitable that they should act greatly. From the first, they had to see the round globe as one problem. It was impossible any longer to deal with it piece by piece. They had to secure it universally from any fresh outbreak of atomic destruction. And they had to ensure a permanent and universal pacification. On this capacity to grasp and wield the whole round globe, their existence depended. There was no scope for any further performance. So soon as a seizure of the existing supplies of atomic ammunition and the apparatus for synthesizing Carolinum was assured, the disbanding or social utilization of the various masses of troops still under arms had to be arranged, the salvation of the year's harvests, and the feeding, housing, and employment of the drifting millions of homeless people. In Canada, in South America, and Asiatic Russia, there were vast accumulations of provision that was immovable only because of the breakdown of the monetary and credit systems. These had to be brought into the famine districts very speedily if entire depopulation was to be avoided. And their transportation and the revival 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 council speedily passed to constructions of a more permanent type. They found far less friction than might have been expected in turning the loose population on their hands to these things. People were extraordinarily tamed by that year of suffering and death. They were disillusioned of their traditions, bereft of once obstinate prejudices. They felt foreign in a strange world and ready to follow any confident leadership. The orders of the new government came with the best of all credentials, rations. The people everywhere were easy to control. One of the old labor experts who had survived until the new time witnesses as gangs of emigrant workers in a new land. And now it was that the social possibilities of the atomic energy began to appear. The new machinery that had come into existence before the last wars increased and multiplied and the council found itself not only with millions of hands at its disposal but with power and apparatus that made its first conceptions of the work it had to do seem pitifully timid. The camps that were planned in iron and deal were built in stone and brass. The roads that were to have been mere iron tracks became spacious ways that insisted upon architecture. The cultivations of foodstuffs that were to have supplied emergency rations were presently with synthesizers, fertilizers, actinic light and scientific direction in excess of every human need. The government had begun with the idea of temporarily reconstituting the social and economic system that had prevailed before the first coming of the atomic engine because it was to this system that the ideas and habits of the great mass of the world's dispossessed population was adapted. Subsequent rearrangement, it had hoped to leave to its successors whoever they might be but this, it became more and more manifest was absolutely impossible. As well might the council have proposed a revival of slavery. The capitalist system had already been smashed beyond repair by the onset of limitless golden energy. It fell to pieces at the first endeavor to stand it up again. Already before the war, half of the industrial class had been out of work. The attempt to put them back into wages employment on the old lines was futile from the onset. The absolute shattering of the currency system 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 labor whatever. In a little while, the 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. The manufacture of hand-woven textiles, fruit growing, flower growing and landscape gardening on a grand scale to keep the less adaptable out of mischief and of paying wages to the younger adults for attendance at school that would equip them to use the new atomic machinery. So quite insensibly, the council drifted into a complete reorganization 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 and before a year was out the records of the council show clearly that it was rising to its enormous opportunity and partly through its own direct control and partly through a series of specific committees. It was planning a new common social order for the entire population of the earth. There can be no real social stability or any general human happiness while large areas of the world and large classes of people are in a phase of civilization different from the prevailing mass. It is impossible now to have great blocks of population misunderstanding the generally accepted social purpose or at an economic disadvantage to the rest. So the council expressed its conception of the problem it had to solve. The peasants, the field worker, and all barbaric cultivators were at an economic disadvantage to the more mobile and educated classes and the logic of the situation compelled the council to take up systematically the supercession of this stratum by a more efficient organization of production. It developed a scheme for the progressive establishment throughout the world of the modern system in agriculture, a system that should give the full advantages of a civilized life to every agricultural worker. And this replacement has been going on right up to the present day. The central idea of the modern system is a substitution of cultivating guilds for the individual 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 themselves responsible for a certain average produce. They are body small enough as a rule to be run on a strictly democratic basis and large enough to supply all the labor except for a certain assistance from townspeople during the harvest needed upon the land farm. They have watchers bungalows or chalets on the ground cultivated, but the ease and costlessness of modern locomotion enables them to maintain a group of residences in the nearest town and dining room and clubhouse, and usually also a guildhouse 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 spies and the 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 19th 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 Bursago 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 worldwide elstribution of English gave them a bias for it from the beginning. The extreme simplicity of its grammar was also in its favor. 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 systematized and adopted 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 1,900 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 13 months of four weeks each, and New Year's Day and Leap Year's Day were made holidays. It did not count at all in the ordinary week, so the weeks and months were brought into correspondence. And moreover, as the king put it to fearman, it was decided to nail down Easter in these matters. As in so many matters, the new civilization 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 upon a cash basis and were almost inconceivable without that convenient liquidating factor. It seemed absolutely necessary to the life of the social organization 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 20 marks, 25 francs, $5, 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 Bursago council came to realize 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 remolding 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 19th century, its work, the continual active planning and replanning of the world as a place of human habitation, is now so to speak the collaborative material activity of the race. The spontaneous disorderly spreadings and recessions of populations as aimless and mechanical as the trickling of split water, which was the substance of history for endless years, giving rise 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 airplane 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 are now 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 sunbaths 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 had 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 traveler, 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 labor of those who work upon the soil. And the food now of the whole world is produced by less than 1% of its population, a percentage which still tends to decrease. Far few people are needed upon the land than training and proclivity disposed 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. Four, 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 a placence 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. Chapter 4 of The World Set Free by H.G. Wells This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Adam Marsatich June 2009, Alexandria, Virginia The World Set Free by H.G. Wells Chapter IV The New Phase Section 9 The early years of the World Republic witnessed a certain recredescence of political adventure. There was, it is rather curious to note, no revival of separatism until the face of King Ferdinand Charles had vanished from the sight of Med. But in a number of countries, as the first urgent physical needs were Med, 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 20th 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 organization to these complaints. At first, the council disregarded this developing opposition, and then it recognized 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 had been miscellaneous. At no time were these invitations issued with an admission that they recognized 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 in 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 ex-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 clamor 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, who was decided, must be for life, save in the exceptional case of a recall. But the elections, which were held quinquennially, were arranged to add 50 members on each occasion. The method of proportional representation with one transferable vote was adopted, and the voter might also write upon his voting paper in a specially marked space the name of any of his representatives that he wished to recall. A ruler was recallable by as many votes as the quota by which he had been elected, and the original members by as many votes in any constituency as the returning quotas in the first election. Upon these conditions, the council submitted itself very cheerfully to the suffrages of the world. None of its members were recalled, and its 50 new associates, which included 27 which it had seen fit to recommend, were of an altogether too miscellaneous quality to disturb the broad trend of its policy. Its freedom from rules or formalities prevented any obstructive proceedings, and when one of the two newly arrived home rule members for India sought for information how to bring in a bill, they learned simply that bills were not brought in. They asked for the speaker, and were privileged to hear much ripe wisdom from the ex-King Egbert, who is now consciously among the seniors of the gathering. Thereafter, they were baffled men. But already, by that time, the work of the council was drawing to an end. It was concerned not so much for the continuation of its construction as for the preservation of its accomplished work from the dramatic instincts of the politician. The life of the race becomes indeed more and more independent of the formal government. The council, in its opening phase, was heroic in spirit. A dragon-slaying body. It slashed out of the existence of vast, knotted tangle of obsolete ideas and clumsy jealous proprietorships. It's secured by a noble system of institutional precautions, freedom of inquiry, freedom of criticism, free communications, a common basis of education and understanding, and freedom from economic oppression. With that, its creative task was accomplished. It became more and more an established security and less and less an active intervention. There is nothing in our time to correspond with the continual petty-making and entangling of laws in an atmosphere of contention that is perhaps the most perplexing aspect of constitutional history in the 19th century. In that age, they seem to have been perpetually making laws when we should alter regulations. The work of change, which we delegate to these scientific committees of specific general direction which have the special knowledge needed in which are themselves dominated by the broad intellectual process of the community, was in those days inextricably mixed up with legislation. They fought over the details. We should assume think of fighting over the arrangement of a parts of a machine. We know nowadays that such things go on best within laws as life goes on between earth and sky. And so it is that government gathers now for a day or so each year under the sunshine of Brasago when Saint Bruno's lilies are in flower and does little more than bless the work of its committees. And even these committees are less originative and more expressive of the general thought than they were at first. It becomes difficult to mark out the particular directive personalities of the world. Continually we are less personal. Every good thought contributes now. And every able brain falls within that informal and dispersed kingship which gathers together into one purpose the energies of the race. Section 10. It is doubtful if we shall ever see again the phase of human existence in which politics that is to say a partisan interference with the ruling sanities of the world will be the dominant interest among serious men. We seem to have entered upon an entirely new phase in history in which contention as distinguished from rivalry has almost abruptly ceased to be the usual occupation and has become at most a subdued and hidden and discredited thing. Contentious professions cease to be an honorable employment for men. Human nations is also a peace between individuals. We live in a world that comes of age. Man the warrior, man the lawyer and all the bickering aspects of life pass into obscurity. The grave dreamers man the curious learner and man the creative artists come forward to replace these barbaric aspects of existence by a less ignoble adventure. There is no natural life of man. He is and has always been a sheath of varied and even incompatible possibilities. A palimpsest of inherited dispositions. It was the habit of many writers in the early 20th century to speak of competition and the narrow private life of trade and saving and suspicious isolation as though such things were the way proper to the human constitution and as though openness of mind and a preference for achievement over possession were abnormal and rather unsubstantial qualities. How wrong that was the history of the decades immediately following the establishment of the world republic witnesses. Once the world was released from the hardening insecurities of a needless struggle for life that was effectively planless and individually absorbing. It became apparent that there was in the vast mass of people a long smothered passion to make things. The world broke out into making and at first mainly into aesthetic making. This phase of history which has been not in aptly termed the efflorescence is still to a large extent with us. The majority of our population consists of artists and the bulk of activity in the world lies no longer with necessities but with their elaboration decoration and refinement. There has been an evident change in the quality of this making during recent years. It becomes more purposeful than it was losing something of its first elegance and prettiness being in intensity but that is a change rather of hue than of nature. That comes with a deepening philosophy and a sounder education. For the first joyous exercises of fancy we perceive now the deliberation of a more constructive imagination. There is a natural order in these things and art comes before science as a satisfaction of more elemental needs and as play and pleasure come in a human life before the development of a settled purpose. For thousands of years this gathering impulse to creative work must have struggled in man against the limitations opposed upon him by his social ineptitude. It was a long smoldering fire that flamed out at last in all these things. The evidence of a pathetic perpetually thwarted urgency to make something is one of the most touching aspects of the relics and records of our immediate ancestors. There exists still in the death area about the London Bombs a region of deserted small homes that furnish the most illuminating comment on the old state of affairs. These homes are entirely horrible, uniform square, squat hideously proportioned uncomfortable, dingy and in some respects quite filthy only people in complete disrepair of anything better could have lived in them. But to each is attracted a ridiculous little rectangle of land called the garden containing usually a prop for drying clothes and a loathsome box of awful the dustbin full of eggshells, cinders and such like refuse. Now that one may go about this region in comparative security for the London radiations have dwindled to inconsiderable proportions, it is possible to trace in nearly every one of these gardens some effort to make. Here it is a poor little plank summer house, here it is a fountain of bricks and oyster shells, here a rockery, here a workshop houses everywhere, there are pitiful little decorations clumsy models, feeble drawings. These efforts are almost incredibly inept like the drawings of blindfolded men. They are only one shade less harrowing to a sympathetic observer than the scribblings one finds upon the walls of the old prisons. But there they are witnessing to the poor buried instincts that floods the light. The god of joyous expression our poor fathers ignorantly sought, our freedom has declared to us. In the old days the common ambition of every simple soul was to possess a little property, a patch of land a house uncontrolled by others and independence as the English used to put it and what made this desire for freedom and prosperity so was very evidently the dream of self-expression of doing something with it, of playing with it, of making a personal delightfulness, a distinctiveness property was never more than a means to an end nor avarice more than a perversion men owned in order to do freely now that every one of us has his own apartments and his own privacy secure this disposition to own has found its release in a new direction. Men study and save and strive that they may leave behind them a series of panels in some public arcade, a row of carbon figures along a terrace a grove, a pavilion or they give themselves to the penetration of some still opaque riddle in phenomena as once men gave themselves to the accumulation of riches. The work that was once the whole substance of social existence for most men spent all their lives in earning a living is now no more than was the burden upon one of those old climbers who carried knapsacks of provisions on their backs in order that they might ascend mountains. It matters little to the easy charities of our emancipated time that most people who have made their labor contribution produce neither new beauty nor new wisdom, but are simply about those pleasant activities and enjoyments that reassure them that they are alive. They help, it may be by reception and reverberation and they hinder nothing. Section 11 Now all this phase of gigantic change in the contours and appearances of human life which is going on all about us. A change as rapid and as wonderful as the swift ripening of adolescence to manhood after the barbaric boyish years is correlated with moral and mental changes at least as unprecedented. It is not as if old things were going out of life and new things coming in. It is rather that the altered circumstances of men are making an appeal to elements in his nature that have hitherto been suppressed and checking tendencies that have hitherto been overstimulated and overdeveloped. He has not so much grown and altered his essential being as turned new aspects to the light. Such turnings round into a new attitude the world has seen on a less extensive scale before. The highlanders of the 17th century for example were cruel and bloodthirsty robbers. In the 19th, their descendants were conspicuously trusty and honorable men. There was not a people in western Europe in the early 20th century that seemed capable of hideous massacres and none that had not been guilty of them within the previous two centuries. The free, frank, kindly gentle life of the prosperous classes in any European country before the years of the last wars was in a different world of thought and feeling from that of the dingy, suspicious, secretive and uncharitable existence of the respectable poor or of the constant personal violence, the squalor and naive passions of the lowest stratum. Yet there were no differences of blood and inherent quality between these worlds. Their differences were all in circumstances, and habits of mind. And turning to more individual instances, the constantly observed difference between one portion of a life and another consequent upon a religious conversion were a standing example of the versatile possibilities of human nature. The catastrophe of the atomic bombs which shook men out of cities and businesses and economic relations shook them also out of their old established habits of thought and out of the lightly held beliefs and prejudices that came down to them from the past. To borrow world from the old fashioned chemists, men were made nascent. They were released from old ties. For good or evil they were ready for new associations. The council carried them forward for good. Perhaps if his bombs had reached their destination, King Ferdinand Charles might have carried them back to an endless chain of evils. But his task would have been a harder one than the council's. The moral shock of the atomic bombs had been a profound one and for a while the cunning side of the human animal was overpowered by its sincere realization of the vital necessity for reconstruction. The litigious and trading spirits cowered together scared at their own consequences. Men thought twice before they sought mean advantages in the face of the unusual eagerness to realize new aspirations. And when at last the weeds revived again and claims began to sprout, they sprouted upon the stony soil of law courts reformed. Of laws that pointed to the future instead of the past. And under the blazing sunshine of a transforming world, a new literature, a new interpretation of history were springing into existence, a new teaching was already in the schools, a new faith in the young. The worthy man who forestalled the building of a research city for the English upon the Sussex Downs by buying up a series of estates was dispossessed and laughed out of court when he made his demand for some preposterous compensation. The owner of the discredited DOS patents makes his last appearance upon the scroll of history as the insolvent proprietor of a papal called the Cry for Justice in which he duns the world for a hundred million pounds. That was the ingenious DOS's idea of justice. That he ought to be paid about five million pounds annually because he had annexed the salvage of one of Holston's discoveries. DOS came at last to believe quite firmly in his right and he died a victim of conspiracy mania in a private hospital at Nice. Both of these men would have probably have ended their days enormously wealthy and of course ennobled in the England of the opening 20th century and it is just this novelty of their fates that marks the quality of the new age. The new government early discovered the need of a universal education to fit men to the great conceptions of its universal rule. It made no wrangling attacks on the local, racial, and sectarian forms of religious profession that at the time divided the earth into a patchwork of hatreds and distrusts. It left these organizations to make their peace with God in their own time. But it proclaimed as if it were a mere secular truth that sacrifice was expected from all that respect had to be shown to all. It revived schools or set them up afresh all around the world and everywhere these schools taught the history of war and the consequences and moral of the last war. It was taught not as a sentiment but as a matter of fact that the salvation of the world from waste and contention was the common duty and occupation of all men and women. These things which are now the elementary common places of human intercourse seem to the counselors of Brasago when first they dared to proclaim them marvelously daring discoveries not untouched by doubt that flushed the cheek and fired the eye. The council placed all this educational reconstruction in the hands of a committee of men and women which did its work during the next few decades with remarkable breath and effectiveness. The educational committee was and is the correlative upon the mental and spiritual side of the redistribution committee and prominent upon it and indeed for a time quite dominating it was a Russian named Karinen who was singular in being a congenial cripple. His body was bent so that he walked with difficulty suffered much pain as he grew older and had at last to undergo two operations the second killed him already malformation which was to be seen in every crowd during the middle ages so that the crippled beggar was as it were an essential feature of the human spectacle was becoming a strange thing in the new world. It had a curious effect upon Karinen's colleagues their feeling towards him was mingled with pity and a sense of inhumanity that it needed usage rather than reason to overcome. He had a strong face with little bright brown eyes and a large resolute thin lipped mouth his skin was very yellow and wrinkled his hair iron gray. He was at all times an impatient and sometimes an angry man but this was forgiven him because of the hot wire of suffering that was manifestly thrust through his being at the end of his life his personal prestige was very great and him far more than any contemporary it is due that self-abnegation self-identification with the spirit world was made the basis of universal education that general memorandum to the teachers which is the keynote of the modern educational system was probably entirely his work whosoever should save his soul should lose it he wrote that is the device upon the seal of this document and the starting point of all we have to do it is a mistake to regard it as anything but a plain statement of fact it is the basis for your work you have to teach self-forgetfulness and everything else that you have to teach is contributory and subordinate to that end education is the release of man you have to widen the horizons of your children encourage and intensify their curiosity and their creative impulses and cultivate and enlarge their sympathies that is what you are for under your guidance and the suggestions you will bring to bear on them you have to shed the old atom of instinctive suspicions hostilities and find themselves again in the great being of the universe the little circles of their egotisms have to be opened out until they become arcs in the sweep of the racial purpose and this that you teach to others you must learn also sedulously yourselves philosophy discovery art every sort of skill every sort of service from that narrow loneliness of desire that brooding preoccupation with self and egotistical relationships which is hell for the individual treason to the race and exile from god section 12 as things round themselves off and accomplish themselves one begins for the first time to see them clearly from the perspectives of a new age one can look back upon the great and widening stream of literature with a complete understanding things link up that seem disconnected and things that were once condemned as harsh and aimless are seen to be but factors in the statement of a gigantic problem an enormous bulk of the sincere writing of the 18th 19th and 20th centuries falls together now in an unanticipated unanimity one sees it as a huge tissue of variations upon one theme the conflict of human egotism and personal passion and narrow imaginations on the one hand against the growing sense of wider necessities and a possible more spacious life that conflict is in evidence in so nearly a work as Voltaire's Candide for example in which the desire for justice as well as happiness beats against human contrarity and takes refuge at last in a forced and inconclusive contentment with little things Candide was but one of the pioneers of a literature of uneasy complaint that was presently an innumerable multitude of books the novels more particularly of the 19th century if one excludes the mere storytellers from our consideration witness to this uneasy realization of changes that call for effort and the lack of that effort in a thousand aspects now tragically now comically now with a funny affectation of divine detachment a countless host of witnesses tell their story of lives fretting between dreams and limitations now one laughs now one weeps with the blank astonishment at this huge and almost unpremeditated record of how the growing human spirit now warily, now eagerly now furiously and always as it seems unsuccessfully tried to adapt itself to the maddening misfit of its patched and ancient garments and always in these books as one draws nearer to the heart of the matter and evasion it was a fantastic convention of the time that a writer should not touch upon religion to do so was to rouse the jealous fury of the great multitude of professional religious teachers it was permitted to state the discord but it was forbidden to glance at any possible reconciliation religion was the privilege of the pulpit it was not only from the novels that religion was omitted it was ignored by the newspapers it was pedantically disregarded in the discussion of business questions it played a trivial and apologetic part in public affairs and this was done not out of contempt but respect the hold of the old religious organizations upon men's respect was still enormous so enormous that there seemed to be a quality of irreverence in applying religion to the developments of every day this strange suspension of religion lasted over into the beginnings of the new age it was a clear vision of Marcus Corrinan much more than any other contemporary influence which brought it back into the texture of human life he saw religion without hallucinations without superstitious reverence as a common thing necessary as necessary as food and air as land and energy to the life of man and the well-being of the Republic he saw that indeed it had already percolated away from the temples and hierarchies and symbols in which men had sought to imprison it and that it was already at work anonymously and obscurely in the universal acceptance of the greater state he gave it clearer expression rephrased it to the lights and perspectives of the new dawn but if we return to our novels for our evidence of the spirit of the times it becomes evident as one reads them in their chronological order so far as that is now ascertainable that is one comes to the latter 19th and the earlier 20th century the writers are much more acutely aware of secular change than their predecessors were the earlier novelists tried to show life as it is the latter showed life as it changes more and more of their characters are engaged in adaptation to change or suffering from the effects of world changes and as we come up to the time of the last wars this newer conception of the everyday life as a reaction to an accelerated development is continually more manifest Barney's book which has served us so well is frankly a picture of the world coming about like a ship that sails into the wind our later novelists give a vast gallery of individual conflicts in which old habits and customs limited ideas ungenerous temperaments and innate obsessions are pitted against this great opening out of life that has happened to us they tell us of the feelings of old people who have been wrenched away from familiar surroundings and how they have had to make peace with uncomfortable comforts and conveniences that are still strange to them they give us the discord between the opening egotisms of youth and the ill-defined limitations of a changing social life they tell of the universal struggle of jealousy to capture and cripple our souls of romantic failures of the tragic misconceptions of the trend of the world of the spirit of adventure and the urgency of curiosity and how these serve the universal drift and all their stories lead in the end either to happiness missed or happiness won to disaster or salvation the clearer their vision and the subtler their art the more certainly do these novels tell of the possibility of salvation for all the world for any road in life leads to religion for those upon it who will follow it far enough it would have seemed a strange thing to the men of the former time that it should be an open question as it is today whether the world is holy christian or not christian at all but assuredly we have the spirit and as surely have we left many temporary forms behind christianity was the first expression of world religion the first complete repudiation of tribalism and war and disputation that it fell presently into the ways of more ancient rituals cannot alter that the common sense of mankind has toiled through two thousand years of chastening experience to find at last how sound meaning attaches to the familiar phrases of the christian faith the scientific thinker as he widens out to the moral problems of the collective life comes inevitably upon the words of christ and as inevitably does the christian as his thought grows clear arrive at the world republic as for the claims of the sex as for the use of a name and successions we live in a time that has shaken itself free from such claims and consistencies End of Chapter 4