The World Set Free

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.