H. Wells - The World Set Free

and we realised what was going on. They were ringing a peal. 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 seethe 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 existencedepended. There

was no scope for any further performance.

So soon as the seizure of the existingsupplies of atomic

ammunition and the apparatus for synthesising Carolinum was

assured, the disbanding or social utilisation 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 feltforeign 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 as easy to

control, one of the old labour 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 disposalbut

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

synthesisers, fertilisers, 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 gold and energy;

it fell to pieces at the first endeavour 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 outset-the absoluteshattering

of the currency system alonewould 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 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 schools that would

equip them to use the new atomic machinery… So quite

insensibly the council drifted into a complete reorganisation 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 realsocial

stability or any general human happinesswhile large areas of the

world and large classes of people are in a phase of civilisation

different from the prevailing mass. It is impossible now to have

great blocks of population misunderstanding the generally

acceptedsocial purpose or at an economic disadvantage to the

rest.' So the council expressed its conception of the problem it

had to solve. The peasant, 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 supersession of this

stratum by a more efficient organisation 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 civilised 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

the 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 responsiblefor 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