Imaginary wars and battles -- Fiction; Nuclear warfare -- Fiction; War stories
Man who is ceasing to be an agricultural animal becomes more and more a
builder, a traveller, and a maker. How much he ceases to be a
cultivator of the soil the returns of the Redistribution Committee
showed. Every year the work of our scientific laboratories increases
the productivity and simplifies the labour of those who work upon the
soil, and the food now 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 towards 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
pleasaunce in the place of its former fields, and the area of freedom
and beauty is increased. And the chemists’ 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.
Section 8
The early years of the World Republic witnessed a certain recrudescence
of political adventure. There was, it is rather curious to note, no
revival of separatism after the face of King Ferdinand Charles had
vanished from the sight of men, but 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,
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 organisation to these complaints. At first the council disregarded
this developing opposition, and then it recognised it with an entirely
devastating frankness.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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