rranged, 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 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 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 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