, 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 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 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 real social stability or any general human happiness while
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 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
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 organis