4

The conference received him without undue excitement. Only Bodisham, Norvel, Dreed, Roots and Chiffan were present. He sat down in the place reserved for him at the head of the table, and regardless of what point they might be discussing at the moment said: "Well, tell me all about it…"

For some time they had been drawing up a document which Bodisham had originally suggested and which Rud had embarked upon with much enthusiasm. His conception of it had been rather different from Bodisham's; but in the long run Bodisham's tenacious mind became dominant in its production.

The title at any rate was Rud's. It was to be called The Fundamental Law, and its general purpose was to present all the structural ideas of the new world society in such a form that they could be used in schools and colleges everywhere and made the criterion, the standard pattern, for administrative and subsidiary legislative action. But Bodisham had conceived something much more scientific, explicit and directive, and under his influence the Fundamental Law began to take on something of the systematic detail of the Code Napoleon. It acquired the bulk of a handbook, the tone of a textbook. It cited authorities; it not only made statements but proved them. Chiffan made some bright interpolations, but Bodisham's tendency towards a serious practicality prevailed over him. The rest of the Group contributed little to this "Bible of the New World". (One of Rud's rejected phrases.) Thirp, Bellacourt, Holbank, Darwin, and the indefinite fringe of new and occasional members who came and went to the administrative centre at the instance of Bodisham and Rud, rarely put in an appearance at these deliberations.

Rud was greatly excited by the composition of the exordium. He drafted that, re–wrote it again after a long and fruitful discussion with Bodisham, argued a number of minor points, lost his temper, recovered his balance, re–phrased the final version. But after the exordium his interest waned. He was becoming more and more impatient with detail; it irritated him; it irritated him to realise how much more ably almost any practical question could be handled by his colleagues; once or twice, in order not to contradict himself, he had walked out upon some unexpected issue on which he had given way to impulse and taken the wrong line. No one ever reminded him of these occasions, but they went on with the planning under Bodisham's direction as though he had not intervened. He began to come late, and on one or two occasions he had absented himself altogether.

That exordium is by itself a fairly comprehensive document. It recites ably and clearly all the primary ideas that had grown out of the crude popular Leftism from which he and Chiffan had started. But they had been tried out now, scrutinised, polished. It incorporated Bodisham's analysis of the meaning of power, and the essence of Rud's mysticism.

"The whole planet earth," it commences, "is the inalienable heritage and possession of the Common Man. The World Revolution bases its methods of rule, law, production, distribution, its education and its finance, upon that conception of a common ownership." Then with a sweeping thoroughness it disposes of the pretensions of sovereign states, of non–functional proprietorship, of sex, race, caste or class, of usurers or any type of creditors or successful gamblers, to qualify that principle of the indivisible sovereignty of the whole race. Food, shelter, freedom, the healthiest possible life and universally accessible knowledge constituted the birthright of every mentally and physically sound child born into the world.

In accordance with this initial statement the exordium goes on to define the main branches of human interest and activity as they have henceforth to be administered. All Rud's fundamental maxims and all that he had picked up and assimilated from the more penetrating dicta of Chiffan and the more scientific and comprehensive approach of Bodisham are woven into this general statement. And it repudiates the idea that it has any unnatural and arbitrary quality. It insists on the logical necessity of the Revolution. Now and again an unmistakable biblical echo, due to the early education of Chiffan, appears in the phrasing. "The Revolution," it says explicitly, "came not to destroy but fulfil."

"The whole earth belongs to everyone. That is not a doctrine, that is a fact—long overlooked. We restore what individuals and groups and gangs and nations have appropriated in the past. But restoration is not a reversal of human conditions. It is only a clarification. There is no real distinction between political, social and economic control, that is an error that has crept into social life as it has developed. They are inseparable in a rational order. Individual wages, money, properly shrink in importance as competent directorates are established. That is no Communist dogma; it is commonsense…"

And further, the exordium of the Fundamental Law explains: "The essence of the Revolution is to abolish the attainment of unqualified power of man over man either by vote–getting, money–pressure or crude terror. The Revolution repudiates profit or terror altogether as methods of human intercourse. It turns the attention of men and women back from a frantic and futile struggle for the means of power, a struggle against our primary social instincts, to an innate urgency to make and to a beneficial competition for pre–eminence in social service. It recalls man to a clean and creative life from the entanglements and perversion of secondary issues into which he has fallen. It replaces property and official authority by the compelling prestige of sound achievement. Eminent service remains the only source of influence left in the world…"

That last idea is pure Bodisham, but the voice is the voice of Rud.