I pondered this for days on end. It seemed to be feasible in some ways; but in other directions I saw the difficulties to the full. The clean slate was not a real thing at all. Environment counts for so much; and all the adult minds in the community had been bred in the atmosphere of the past. Their influence would always be there to hamper us, bearing down upon the younger generations and cramping them in the old ideas. There could be no clean severance between present and future, only a gradual change of outlook through the years.
My third stage of evolution led on from this conclusion. I accepted the present as it was and then tried to discover ways in which improvements might be made in the future. Again I spent days in picking out faults and making additions to the fabric of society; and at the end of it all I found, as I had done before, that the result was a patchwork, something which had no organic life of its own.
At this point, I think, I began to despair entirely; and I fell back upon pure materialism. I considered the matter solely from the standpoint of the practical needs of the time; for there I felt myself upon sure ground. Whatever happened, I must have ready a concrete scheme which would tide us over our early stages in the future.
I secured statistics showing the proportions of the population which would be required in all the different branches of labour during the coming year; and in doing this I had to divide them into groups according as they were to work on the land or were required for keeping up the supply of fixed nitrogen from the factories. My charts showed me the areas which we expected to have under cultivation at given dates in the future. I was back again in the unreal world of graphs and curves; and I think that in some ways it was an advantage to me to eliminate the human factor. It kept me from brooding too much over my recollections of humanity in its decline.
On this materialistic basis, the whole thing resolved itself into a problem of labour economy: the devising of a method whereby the greatest yield of food could be obtained with the smallest expenditure of power. Here I was on familiar ground; for it was my factory problem over again, though the actual conditions were different. There were only two main sides to the question: on the one hand I had to ensure the greatest amount of food possible and on the other I had to look to the ease of distribution of that food when it was produced. The idea of huge tractor-ploughed areas followed as a matter of course; and from this developed the conception of humanity gathered into a number of moderately-sized aggregations rather than spread in cottages here and there throughout the country-side. Each of these centres of population would contain within itself all the essentials of existence and would thus be a single unit capable of almost independent existence.
Having in this way roughed out my scheme, other factors forced themselves on my attention. I had no wish to utilise the old villages which still remained dotted here and there about the country-side. Their sizes and positions had been dictated by conditions which had now passed away; and it seemed better to make a clean sweep of them and start afresh. From the purely practical standpoint, the erection of huge phalansteries at fixed points would no doubt have been the simplest solution of the problem; but I rejected this conception. I wanted something better than barracks for my people to live in. I wanted variety, not a depressing uniformity. And I wanted beauty also.
Step by step I began to see my way clearer before me. And now that I look back upon it, I was simply following in the track of Nature herself. To make sure of the material things, to preserve the race first of all; then to increase comfort, to make some spot of the Earth’s surface different from the rest for each of us, to create a “home”; lastly, when the material side had been buttressed securely, to turn to the mind and open it to beauty: that seems to me to be the normal progress of humanity in the past, from the Stone Age onwards.
It was at this period that Elsa Huntingtower came more into my life. While I was laying down the broad outlines of the material side of the coming reconstruction, I had preferred to work alone; for in dealing with problems of this nature, it seems to me best to have a single mind upon the work. It was largely a matter of dry statistics, calculations, graphs, estimates, cartography and so forth; and since it seemed to me to be governed almost entirely by practical factors, I did not think that much could be gained by calling for her help. I waited till I had the outlines of the project completed before applying to Nordenholt in the matter. When I spoke to him, he agreed with what I had done.
“I don’t want to see your plans, Jack. It’s your show; and if I were to see them I would probably want to make suggestions and shake your trust in your own judgment. Much better not.”