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, 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.