might ask for shorter hours. And of course we could give them shorter hours.
Technically, it would be perfectly simple to reduce all lower-caste working hours to
three or four a day. But would they be any the happier for that? No, they wouldn't.
The experiment was tried, more than a century and a half ago. The whole of Ireland
was put on to the four-hour day. What was the result? Unrest and a large increase in
the consumption of soma; that was all. Those three and a half hours of extra leisure
were so far from being a source of happiness, that people felt constrained to take a
holiday from them. The Inventions Office is stuffed with plans for labour-saving
processes. Thousands of them." Mustapha Mond made a lavish gesture. "And why
don't we put them into execution? For the sake of the labourers; it would be sheer
cruelty to afflict them with excessive leisure. It's the same with agriculture. We could
synthesize every morsel of food, if we wanted to. But we don't. We prefer to keep a
third of the population on the land. For their own sakes–because it takes longer to
get food out of the land than out of a factory. Besides, we have our stability to think
of. We don't want to change. Every change is a menace to stability. That's another
reason why we're so chary of applying new inventions. Every discovery in pure
science is potentially subversive; even science must sometimes be treated as a
possible enemy. Yes, even science."
Science? The Savage frowned. He knew the word. But what it exactly signified he
could not say. Shakespeare and the old men of the pueblo had never mentioned
science, and from Linda he had only gathered the vaguest hints: science was
something you made helicopters with, some thing that caused you to laugh at the
Corn Dances, something that prevented you from being wrinkled and losing your
teeth. He made a desperate effort to take the Controller's meaning.
"Yes," Mustapha Mond was saying, "that's another item in the cost of stability. It
isn't only art that's incompatible with happiness; it's also science. Science is
dangerous; we have to keep it most carefully chained and muzzled."
"What?" said Helmholtz, in astonishment. "But we're always saying that science is
everything. It's a hypnop?dic platitude."
"Three times a week between thirteen and seventeen," put in Bemard.
"And all the science propaganda we do at the College …"
"Yes; but what sort of science?" asked Mustapha Mond sarcastically. "You've had no
scientific training, so you can't judge. I was a pretty good physicist in my time. Too
good–good enough to realize that all our science is just a cookery book, with an
orthodox theory of cooking that nobody's allowed to question, and a list of recipes
that mustn't be added to except by special permission from the head cook. I'm the
head cook now. But I was an inquisitive young scullion once. I started doing a bit of
cooking on my own. Unorthodox cooking, illicit cooking. A bit of real science, in
fact." He was silent.
"What happened?" asked Helmholtz Watson.
The Controller sighed. "Very nearly what's going to happen to you young men. I was
on the point of being sent to an island."
The words galvanized Bernard into violent and unseemly activity. "Send me to an
island?" He jumped up, ran across the room, and stood gesticulating in front of the
Controller. "You can't send me. I haven't done anything. lt was the others. I swear it
was the others." He pointed accusingly to Helmholtz and the Savage. "Oh, please
don't send me to Iceland. I promise I'll do what I ought to do. Give me another
chance. Please give me another chance." The tears began to flow. "I tell you, it's
their fault," he sobbed. "And not to Iceland. Oh please, your fordship, please …"
And in a paroxysm of abjection he threw himself on his knees before the Controller.
Mustapha Mond tried to make him get up; but Bernard persisted in his grovelling;
the stream of words poured out inexhaustibly. In the end the Controller had to ring
for his fourth secretary.
"Bring three men," he ordered, "and take Mr. Marx into a bedroom. Give him a
good soma vaporization and then put him to bed and leave him."
The fourth secretary went out and returned with three green-uniformed twin
footmen. Still shouting and sobbing. Bernard was carried out.
"One would think he was going to have his throat cut," said the Controller, as the
door closed. "Whereas, if he had the smallest sense, he'd understand that his
punishment is really a reward. He's being sent to an island. That's to say, he's
being sent to a place where he'll meet the most interesting set of men and women
to be found anywhere in the world. All the people who, for one reason or another,
have got too self-consciously individual to fit into community-life. All the people who
aren't satisfied with orthodoxy, who've got independent ideas of their own. Every
one, in a word, who's any one. I almost envy you, Mr. Watson."
Helmholtz laughed. "Then why aren't you on an island yourself?"
"Because, finally, I preferred this," the Controller answered. "I was given the choice:
to be sent to an island, where I could have got on with my pure science, or to be
taken on to the Controllers' Council with the prospect of succeeding in due course to
an actual Controllership. I chose this and let the science go." After a little silence,
"Sometimes," he added, "I rather regret the science. Happiness is a hard
master–particularly other people's happiness. A much harder master, if one isn't
conditioned to accept it unquestioningly, than truth." He sighed, fell silent again,
then continued in a brisker tone, "Well, duty's duty. One can't consult one's own
preference. I'm interested in truth, I like science. But truth's a menace, science is a
public danger. As dangerous as it's been beneficent. It has given us the stablest
equilibrium in history. China's was hopelessly insecure by comparison; even the
primitive matriarchies weren't steadier than we are. Thanks, l repeat, to science. But
we can't allow science to undo its own good work. That's why we so carefully limit the
scope of its researches–that's why I almost got sent to an island. We don't allow it
to deal with any but the most immediate problems of the moment. All other
enquiries are most sedulously discouraged. It's curious," he went on after a little
pause, "to read what people in the time of Our Ford used to write about scientific
progress. They seemed to have imagined that it could be allowed to go on
indefinitely, regardless of everything else. Knowledge was the highest good, truth
the supreme value; all the rest was secondary and subordinate. True, ideas were
beginning to change even then. Our Ford himself did a great deal to shift the
emphasis from truth and beauty to comfort and happiness. Mass production
demanded the shift. Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth
and beauty can't. And, of course, whenever the masses seized political power, then
it was happiness rather than truth and beauty that mattered. Still, in spite of
everytung, unrestricted scientific research was still permitted. People still went on
talking about truth and beauty as though they were the sovereign goods. Right up
to the time of the Nine Years' War. That made them change their tune all right.
What's the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when the anthrax bombs are
popping all around you? That was when science first began to be controlled–after
the Nine Years' War. People were ready to have even their appetites controlled then.
Anything for a quiet life. We've gone on controlling ever since. It hasn't been very
good for truth, of course. But it's been very good for happiness. One can't have
something for nothing. Happiness has got to be paid for. You're paying for it, Mr.
Watson–paying because you happen to be too much interested in beauty. I was too
much interested in truth; I paid too."
"But you didn't go to an island," said the Savage, breaking a long silence.
The Controller smiled. "That's how I paid. By choosing to serve happiness. Other
people's–not mine. It's lucky," he added, after a pause, "that there are such a lot
of islands in the world. I don't know what we should do without them. Put you all in
the lethal chamber, I suppose. By the way, Mr. Watson, would you like a tropical
climate? The Marquesas, for example; or Samoa? Or something rather more
bracing?"
Helmholtz rose from his pneumatic chair. "I should like a thoroughly bad climate,"
he answered. "I believe one would write better if the climate were bad. If there were
a lot of wind and storms, for example …"
The Controller nodded his approbation. "I like your spirit, Mr. Watson. I like it very
much indeed. As much as I officially disapprove of it." He smiled. "What about the
Falkland Islands?"
"Yes, I think that will do," Helmholtz answered. "And now, if you don't mind, I'll go
and see how poor Bernard's getting on."
Chapter Seventeen
ART, SCIENCE–you seem to have paid a fairly high price for your happiness," said
the Savage, when they were alone. "Anything else?"
"Well, religion, of course," replied the Controller. "There used to be something
called God–before the Nine Years' War. But I was forgetting; you know all about
God, I suppose."
"Well …" The Savage hesitated. He would have liked to say something about
solitude, about night, about the mesa lying pale under the moon, about the
precipice, the plunge into shadowy darkness, about death. He would have liked to
speak; but there were no words. Not even in Shakespeare.
The Controller, meanwhile, had crossed to the other side of the room and was
unlocking a large safe set into the wall between the bookshelves. The heavy door
swung open. Rummaging in the darkness within, "It's a subject," he said, "that has
always had a great interest for me." He pulled out a thick black volume. "You've
never read this, for example."
The Savage took it. "The Holy Bible, containing the Old and New Testaments," he read
aloud from the title-page.
"Nor this." It was a small book and had lost its cover.
"The Imitation of Christ."
"Nor this." He handed out another volume.
"The Varieties of Religious Experience. By William James."
"And I've got plenty more," Mustapha Mond continued, resuming his seat. "A whole
collection of pornographic old books. God in the safe and Ford on the shelves." He
pointed with a laugh to his avowed library–to the shelves of books, the rack full of
reading-machine bobbins and sound-track rolls.
"But if you know about God, why don't you tell them?" asked the Savage
indignantly. "Why don't you give them these books about God?"
"For the same reason as we don't give them Othello: they're old; they're about God
hundreds of years ago. Not about God now."
"But God doesn't change."
"Men do, though."
"What difference does that make?"
"All the difference in the world," said Mustapha Mond. He got up again and walked
to the safe. "There was a man called Cardinal Newman," he said. "A cardinal," he
exclaimed parenthetically, "was a kind of Arch-Community-Songster."
"'I Pandulph, of fair Milan, cardinal.' I've read about them in Shakespeare."
"Of course you have. Well, as I was saying, there was a man called Cardinal
Newman. Ah, here's the book." He pulled it out. "And while I'm about it I'll take this
one too. It's by a man called Maine de Biran. He was a philosopher, if you know
what that was."
"A man who dreams of fewer things than there are in heaven and earth," said the
Savage promptly.
"Quite so. I'll read you one of the things he did dream of in a moment. Meanwhile,
listen to what this old Arch-Community-Songster said." He opened the book at the
place marked by a slip of paper and began to read. "'We are not our own any more
than what we possess is our own. We did not make ourselves, we cannot be
supreme over ourselves. We are not our own masters. We are God's property. Is it
not our happiness thus to view the matter? Is it any happiness or any comfort, to
consider that we are our own? It may be thought so by the young and prosperous.
These may think it a great thing to have everything, as they suppose, their own
way–to depend on no one–to have to think of nothing out of sight, to be without the
irksomeness of continual acknowledgment, continual prayer, continual reference of
what they do to the will of another. But as time goes on, they, as all men, will find
that independence was not made for man–that it is an unnatural state–will do for a
while, but will not carry us on safely to the end …'" Mustapha Mond paused, put
down the first book and, picking up the other, turned over the pages. "Take this, for
example," he said, and in his deep voice once more began to read: "'A man grows
old; he feels in himself that radical sense of weakness, of listlessness, of
discomfort, which accompanies the advance of age; and, feeling thus, imagines
himself merely sick, lulling his fears with the notion that this distressing condition is
due to some particular cause, from which, as from an illness, he hopes to recover.
Vain imaginings! That sickness is old age; and a horrible disease it is. They say
that it is the fear of death and of what comes after death that makes men turn to
