day. The old gold coinage was at once to cease to be legal tender
beyond certain defined limits, except to the central government,
which would not reissue it as it came in. It was, in fact, to become
a temporary token coinage, a token coinage of full value for the day
of conversion at any rate, if not afterwards, under the new standard
of energy, and to be replaceable by an ordinary token coinage as
time went on. The old computation by Lions and the values of the
small change of daily life were therefore to suffer no disturbance
whatever.

The economists of Utopia, as I apprehended them, had a different
method and a very different system of theories from those I have
read on earth, and this makes my exposition considerably more
difficult. This article upon which I base my account floated before
me in an unfamiliar, perplexing, and dream-like phraseology. Yet I
brought away an impression that here was a rightness that earthly
economists have failed to grasp. Few earthly economists have been
able to disentangle themselves from patriotisms and politics, and
their obsession has always been international trade. Here in Utopia
the World State cuts that away from beneath their feet; there are no
imports but meteorites, and no exports at all. Trading is the
earthly economists' initial notion, and they start from perplexing
and insoluble riddles about exchange value, insoluble because all
trading finally involves individual preferences which are
incalculable and unique. Nowhere do they seem to be handling really
defined standards, every economic dissertation and discussion
reminds one more strongly than the last of the game of croquet Alice
played in Wonderland, when the mallets were flamingoes and the balls
were hedgehogs and crawled away, and the hoops were soldiers and
kept getting up and walking about. But economics in Utopia must be,