intenser than they had been even at the collapse of the Roman
imperial system. On the one hand was the ancient life of the
family and the small community and the petty industry, on the
other was a new life on a larger scale, with remoter horizons and
a strange sense of purpose. Already it was growing clear that men
must live on one side or the other. One could not have little
tradespeople and syndicated businesses in the same market,
sleeping carters and motor trolleys on the same road, bows and
arrows and aeroplane sharpshooters in the same army, or
illiterate peasant industries and power-driven factories in the
same world. And still less it was possible that one could have
the ideas and ambitions and greed and jealousy of peasants
equipped with the vast appliances of the new age. If there had
been no atomic bombs to bring together most of the directing
intelligence of the world to that hasty conference at Brissago,
there would still have been, extended over great areas and a
considerable space of time perhaps, a less formal conference of
responsible and understanding people upon the perplexities of
this world-wide opposition. If the work of Holsten had been
spread over centuries and imparted to the world by imperceptible
degrees, it would nevertheless have made it necessary for men to
take counsel upon and set a plan for the future. Indeed already
there had been accumulating for a hundred years before the crisis
a literature of foresight; there was a whole mass of 'Modern
State' scheming available for the conference to go upon. These
bombs did but accentuate and dramatise an already developing
problem.
Section 2
This assembly was no leap of exceptional minds and
super-intelligences into the control of affairs. It was
teachable, its members trailed ideas with them to the gathering,
but these were the consequences of the 'moral shock' the bombs
had given humanity, and there is no reason for supposing its
individual personalities were greatly above the average. It
would be possible to cite a thousand instances of error and
inefficiency in its proceedings due to the forgetfulness,
irritability, or fatigue of its members. It experimented
considerably and blundered often. Excepting Holsten, whose gift
was highly specialised, it is questionable whether there was a
single man of the first order of human quality in the gathering.
But it had a modest fear of itself, and a consequent directness
that gave it a general distinction. There was, of course, a
noble simplicity about Leblanc, but even of him it may be asked
whether he was not rather good and honest-minded than in the
fuller sense great.
The ex-king had wisdom and a certain romantic dash, he was a man
among thousands, even if he was not a man among millions, but his
memoirs, and indeed his decision to write memoirs, give the
quality of himself and his associates. The book makes admirable
but astonishing reading. Therein he takes the great work the
council was doing for granted as a little child takes God. It is
as if he had no sense of it at all. He tells amusing trivialities
about his cousin Wilhelm and his secretary Firmin, he pokes fun
at the American president, who was, indeed, rather a little
accident of the political machine than a representative American,
and he gives a long description of how he was lost for three days
in the mountains in the company of the only Japanese member, a
loss that seems to have caused no serious interruption of the
work of the council…
The Brissago conference has been written about time after time,
as though it were a gathering of the very flower of humanity.
Perched up there by the freak or wisdom of Leblanc, it had a
certain Olympian quality, and the natural tendency of the human
mind to elaborate such a resemblance would have us give its
members the likenesses of gods. It would be equally reasonable
to compare it to one of those enforced meetings upon the
mountain-tops that must have occurred in the opening phases of
the Deluge. The strength of the council lay not in itself but in
the circumstances that had quickened its intelligence, dispelled
its vanities, and emancipated it from traditional ambitions and
antagonisms. It was stripped of the accumulation of centuries, a
naked government with all that freedom of action that nakedness
affords. And its problems were set before it with a plainness
that was out of all comparison with the complicated and
perplexing intimations of the former time.
Section 3
The world on which the council looked did indeed present a task
quite sufficiently immense and altogether too urgent for any
wanton indulgence in internal dissension. It may be interesting
to sketch in a few phrases the condition of mankind at the close
of the period of warring states, in the year of crisis that
followed the release of atomic power. It was a world
extraordinarily limited when one measures it by later standards,
and it was now in a state of the direst confusion and distress.
It must be remembered that at this time men had still to spread
into enormous areas of the land surface of the globe. There were
vast mountain wildernesses, forest wildernesses, sandy deserts,
and frozen lands. Men still clung closely to water and arable
soil in temperate or sub-tropical climates, they lived abundantly
only in river valleys, and all their great cities had grown upon
large navigable rivers or close to ports upon the sea. Over great
areas even of this suitable land flies and mosquitoes, armed with
infection, had so far defeated human invasion, and under their
protection the virgin forests remained untouched. Indeed, the
whole world even in its most crowded districts was filthy with
flies and swarming with needless insect life to an extent which
is now almost incredible. A population map of the world in 1950
would have followed seashore and river course so closely in its