where were as easy to control, one of the old labor experts who had survived until the new time witnesses, "as gangs of immigrant 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 cultivation of food-stuffs 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 purposed a revival of slavery. The capitalistic system had already been smashed beyond repair by the onset of limitless gold and energy; it fell to pieces at the first endeavor to stand it up again.

THE IDLERS

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 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 schools 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 genial 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 NEW AGRICULTURE

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 of 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 agriculturist, 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 gilds for the individual cultivator and for cottage and village life altogether. These gilds are associations of men and women who take over areas of arable or pastureland and make themselves responsible 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 labor, 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 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 gild 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.

VI

As the Brissago 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 despite itself, it decided to place this work of redistributing the non-agricultural population in the hands of a compacter and better qualified special committee. That committee is now far more than the council or 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, are 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 were no longer tethered to running water and the proximity of cultivation, their plans were no longer affected by strategic considerations or thoughts of social insecurity. The aëroplane 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, those long-wasted sunbaths of the race; they tower amid 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 insects 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 water-courses and for pleasant living amid islands and house-boats and bridges and nocturnal lanterns reflected on the sea.

MAN BECOMES A MAKER OF THINGS

MAN, who is ceasing to be an agricultu ral animal, becomes more and more a builder, a traveler, and a maker. How much he ceases to be an agriculturist 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 now the food 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 toward 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 pleasance in the place of its former fields, and the area of freedom and beauty is increased. And the chemist's 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.

VII

THE early years of the world republic witnessed a certain recrudescence of political adventure. 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, and 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.

THE WORLD POWER BROADENS ITS
GOVERNMENT

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 afterward by the issue of invitations that 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 recognized a right. The old institution of monarchy had come out unexpectedly well in the light of the new régime. Nine of the original members of the first government were crowned heads who had resigned their separate sovereignty, and at no time afterward 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, it 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 fifty