m 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
mounta