heart says you are right, my head is doubting still. There must be a mistake somewhere.’
‘Mistake!’ he laughed, overhanging her with his mask of power. ‘When a man’s soul is action, how can he be mistaken that action is divine? I have served the great God, Energy, all my life, from garage boy to World President. Has not the whole American people proved its faith by its success?’
With rapture, but still in perplexity, she gazed at him. ‘There’s something terribly wrong-headed about you Americans,’ she said, ‘but certainly you are great.’ She looked him in the eyes. Then suddenly she laid a hand on him, and said with conviction, ‘Being what you are, you are probably right. Anyhow you are a man, a real man. Take me. Be the father of my boy. Take me to the dangerous cities of America to work with you.’
The President was surprised with sudden hunger for her body, and she saw it; but he turned to the Vice-President and said, ‘She has seen where the truth lies. And you? War, or cooperation in God’s work?’
‘The death of our bodies, or the death of our minds,’ said the Chinese, but with a bitterness that lacked conviction; for he was no fanatic. ‘Well, since the soul is only the harmoniousness of the body’s behaviour, and since, in spite of this little dispute, we are agreed that the coordination of activity is the chief need of the planet today, and since in respect of our differences of temperament this lady has judged in favour of America, and moreover since, if there is any virtue in our Asian way of life, it will not succumb to a little propaganda, but rather will be strengthened by opposition—since all these matters are so, I accept your terms. But it would be undignified in China to let this great change be imposed upon her externally. You must give me time to form in Asia a native and spontaneous party of Energists, who will themselves propagate your gospel, and perhaps give it an elegance which, if I may say so, it has not yet. Even this we will do to secure the cosmopolitan control of Antarctica.’
Thereupon the treaty was signed; but a new and secret codicil was drawn up and signed also, and both were witnessed by the Daughter of Man, in a clear, round, old-fashioned script.
Then, taking a hand of each, she said, ‘And so at last the world is united. For how long, I wonder. I seem to hear my old master’s voice scolding, as though I had been rather stupid. But he failed me, and I have chosen a new master, Master of the World.’
She released the hand of the Asian, and made as if to draw the American away with her. And he, though he was a strict monogamist with a better half waiting for him in New York, longed to crush her sun-clad body to his Puritan cloth. She drew him away among the palm trees.
The Vice-President of the World sat down once more, lit a cigarette, and meditated, smiling.
IV An Americanized Planet
1. THE FOUNDATION OF THE FIRST WORLD STATE
We have now reached that point in the history of the First Men when, some three hundred and eighty terrestrial years after the European War, the goal of world unity was at last achieved—not, however, before the mind of the race had been seriously crippled.
There is no need to recount in detail the transition from rival national sovereignties to unitary control by the World Financial Directorate. Suffice it that by concerted action in America and China the military governments found themselves hamstrung by the passive resistance of cosmopolitan big business. In China this process was almost instantaneous and bloodless; in America there was serious disorder for a few weeks, while the bewildered government attempted to reduce its rebels by martial law. But the population was by now eager for peace; and, although a few business magnates were shot, and a crowd of workers here and there mown down, the opposition was irresistible. Very soon the governing clique collapsed.
The new order consisted of a vast system akin to guild socialism, yet at bottom individualistic. Each industry was in theory democratically governed by all its members, but in practice was controlled by its dominant individuals. Coordination of all industries was effected by a World Industrial Council, whereon the leaders of each industry discussed the affairs of the planet as a whole. The status of each industry on the Council was determined partly by its economic power in the world, partly by public esteem. For already the activities of men were beginning to be regarded as either ‘noble’ or ‘ignoble’; and the noble were not necessarily the most powerful economically. Thus upon the Council appeared an inner ring of noble ‘industries,’ which were, in approximate order of prestige, Finance, Flying, Engineering, Surface Locomotion, Chemical Industry, and Professional Athletics. But the real seat of power was not the Council, not even the inner ring of the Council, but the Financial Directorate. This consisted of a dozen millionaires, with the American President and the Chinese Vice-President at their head.
Within this august committee internal dissensions were inevitable. Shortly after the system had been inaugurated the Vice-President sought to overthrow the President by publishing his connexion with the coloured woman who now styled herself the Daughter of Man. This piece of scandal was expected to enrage the virtuous American public against their hero. But by a stroke of genius the President saved both himself and the unity of the world. Far from denying the charge, he gloried in it. In that moment of sexual triumph, he said, a great truth had been revealed to him. Without this daring sacrifice of his private purity, he would never have been really fit to be President of the World; he would have remained simply an American. In this lady’s veins flowed the blood of all races, and in her mind all cultures mingled. His union with her, confirmed by many subsequent visits, had taught him to enter into the spirit of the East, and had given him a broad human sympathy such as his high office demanded. As a private individual, he insisted, he remained a monogamist with a wife in New York; and, as a private individual, he had sinned, and must suffer for ever the pangs of conscience. But as President of the World, it was incumbent upon him to espouse the World. And since nothing could be said to be real without a physical basis, this spiritual union had to be embodied and symbolized by his physical union with the Daughter of Man. In tones of grave emotion he described through the microphone how, in the presence of that mystical woman, he had suddenly triumphed over his private moral scruples; and how, in a sudden access of the divine energy, he had consummated his marriage with the World in the shade of a banana tree.
The lovely form of the Daughter of Man (decently clad) was transmitted by television to every receiver in the world. Her face, blended of Asia and the West, became a most potent symbol of human unity. Every man on the planet became in imagination her lover. Every woman identified herself with this supreme woman.
Undoubtedly there was some truth in the plea that the Daughter of Man had enlarged the President’s mind, for his policy had been unexpectedly tactful towards the East. Often he had moderated the American demand for the immediate Americanization of China. Often he had persuaded the Chinese to welcome some policy which at first they had regarded with suspicion.
The President’s explanation of his conduct enhanced his prestige both in American and Asia. America was hypnotized by the romantic religiosity of the story. Very soon it became fashionable to be a strict monogamist with one domestic wife, and one ‘symbolical’ wife in the East, or in another town, or a neighbouring street, or with several such in various localities. In China the cold tolerance with which the President was at first treated was warmed by this incident into something like affection. And it was partly through his tact, or the influence of his symbolical wife, that the speeding up of China’s Americanization was effected without disorder.
For some months after the foundation of the World State, China had been wholly occupied in coping with the plague of insanity, called ‘the American madness,’ with which her former enemy had poisoned her. The coast region of