he 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 rested was 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 existing
human relationships had grown up 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 real
value upon which to rest it. 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 existence in Europe or America (the q