w 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 wisdo