H. Wells - The World Set Free

shy, unstimulated life of the lonelyhovel, the narrow scandals

and petty spites and persecutions of the small village, that

hoarding, half inanimate existenceaway 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 ceasedto 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 characteristicof the manner in which large enterprises

forced themselvesupon 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 satisfactionof hearingtheir speech

used universally. The language was shorn of a number of

grammatical peculiarities, the distinctive formsfor 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 understandingand a general simplification of

intercourse once it was acceptedled 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 confusedchronology. 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 restedwas 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

existinghuman relationships had grownup 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 realvalue upon which to restit.

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

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 existencein Europe or America (the question is still in

dispute) somewhere in the closing decades of the nineteenth

century, its work, the continualactive 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 thoughtsof 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 truesocial gatherings, each

with a characterof its own and distinctive interests of its own,