energy, just like drainage and the supply of water, will fall to the
local authority. Moreover, the local authority will be the universal
landowner. Upon that point so extreme an individualist as Herbert
Spencer was in agreement with the Socialist. In Utopia we conclude
that, whatever other types of property may exist, all natural
sources of force, and indeed all strictly natural products, coal,
water power, and the like, are inalienably vested in the local
authorities (which, in order to secure the maximum of convenience
and administrative efficiency, will probably control areas as large
sometimes as half England), they will generate electricity by water
power, by combustion, by wind or tide or whatever other natural
force is available, and this electricity will be devoted, some of it
to the authority's lighting and other public works, some of it, as
a subsidy, to the World-State authority which controls the high
roads, the great railways, the inns and other apparatus of world
communication, and the rest will pass on to private individuals
or to distributing companies at a uniform fixed rate for private
lighting and heating, for machinery and industrial applications of
all sorts. Such an arrangement of affairs will necessarily involve a
vast amount of book-keeping between the various authorities, the
World-State government and the customers, and this book-keeping will
naturally be done most conveniently in units of physical energy.

It is not incredible that the assessment of the various local
administrations for the central world government would be already
calculated upon the estimated total of energy, periodically
available in each locality, and booked and spoken of in these
physical units. Accounts between central and local governments could
be kept in these terms. Moreover, one may imagine Utopian local
authorities making contracts in which payment would be no longer in