The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1914-10-28
CContinued.)
cnAPTER XIV.
A New Common Social Order.

a [
 litieal intrigue or financial con-
 siderattons have a sweeping way
 with them, and before year was out the records of the council show clearly that it was rising to it's enor- nous opportunity and partly through it's own direct control and partly through series of special committees it was planning a new common social order for the entire population of the earth. 1sThere can be no real social stability or any general human happi- ness while large areas of the world and large classes of people are in a phase Of civilization different from the prevailing mass. It is impossible now to have great blocks of population mis- understa anding the generally accepted social purpose or at an economic disad- vantage to the rest. So the council expressed its conception of the prob- lem it had to solve The peasant, the field worker and all barbarfc cultiya- tors were at an economic disadvan- tage1 to the more mobile and educated classes. and the logic of the situation compelled ti.a council to take up sys- tematically the supersession of this stratum by more efficient organiza- ton of production It developed scheme for the progressive establish ment throughout the world of the modern system in agriculture, a sys- tenn that should give the full advan- tages of civilized life to every agri- cultural worker, and this replacement has been going on right up to the pres ent day The central idea of the mod ern system is the substitution of ct1Iti- vating guilds for the individual cuiti
  together. These guilds are associations of men and women who take over areas Of arable or pasture land and make themselves responsible for 8 cer- tain average produce They are bodies small enough as rule, to be run on strictly democratic basis and large enough to supply all the labor, except for certain assistance from towns people during the harvest, needed upon the land farmed They have watchers bungalows or chalets on the ground cultyatedss but the ease and cpstless- ness Of modern locomotion enable them to maintain group of residences in the nearest town with a common dining room and clubhouse and usually also a guild house in the national OF provincial capital
 Already this system has abolished a distinetiYeIy rustic" population throughout vast areas of the old world where 1t has prevailed immemorialIy. That shy, unstimuIated life Of the lone 1y hoveI, the narrow scandals and pet ty spites and prosecutions of the small village, that hOarding, half inanimate existence away from books. thought or social participation, and in constant contact with cattle, pigs and poultry, s.- TV--- s human experience. In little while 1t will be gone altogether. In the nine teenth century it had already ceased to be a necessary human state, and only the absence of any collective intelli- gence and an imagined need for tough and uninteIHgent soldiers and for prolific class at a low level, prevented its systematic replacement at that time
 And while this settlement of the country was in progress the urban camps of the first phase Of the councIPss activities were rapidly developing, part ly through the inherent forces of the situation and partly through the coun- cil's direction, into modern type of town.
 It is characteristic of the manner in which large enterprises forced them selves upon the Brissago council, that it was not until the end of the first year of their administration, and then only with extreme reluctance, that they would take up the manifest need for 1ngua franca for the world. They seem to have given little attention to the various theoretical lniv ersal languages which were proposed to them. They wished to give as little trouble to hasty
 
 worldwide distribution of English gave them a bias for it from the beginning. The extreme simplicity of its grammar was also in it's favor.
 It was not without some sacrifices that the English speaking peoples were permitted the satisfaction of hearing their speech used universally The language was shorn of a number of grammatical peculiarities-the distinc- tive forms for the subjunctive mood, for example-and most of its irregular plurals were abolished. Its spelling was systematfzed and adapted to the vowel sounds in use upon the continent of Europe, and a process Of fncorporat- ing foreign nouns and verbs commenc- ed that speedily reached enormous pro- portions. Within ten years from the establishment of the world republic the new English dictionary had swell ed to include vocabulary of 250, ,O00 words, and a man of 1900 would have found considerable difficulty in reading an ordinary newspaper. On the other hand, the men of the new time could still appreciate the older English liter ature. Certain minor acts of uniform ity accompanied this larger one. The idea of common understanding and a general simplifcation of intercourse once it was accepted led very natural ly to the universal establishment of the metric system of weights and meas ures and to the disappearance of the various makeshift calendars that had hitherto confused chronology. The