untroubled convictions. From that day forth a widening breach can
be traced between his egotistical passions and the social need.
Slowly he adapted himself to the life of the homestead, and his
passionate impulses widened out to the demands of the clan and
the tribe. But widen though his impulses might, the latent hunter
and wanderer and wonderer in his imagination outstripped their
development. He was never quite subdued to the soil nor quite
tamed to the home. Everywhere it needed teaching and the priest
to keep him within the bounds of the plough-life and the
beast-tending. Slowly a vast system of traditional imperatives
superposed itself upon his instincts, imperatives that were
admirably fitted to make him that cultivator, that cattle-mincer,
who was for twice ten thousand years the normal man.
And, unpremeditated, undesired, out of the accumulations of his
tilling came civilisation. Civilisation was the agricultural
surplus. It appeared as trade and tracks and roads, it pushed
boats out upon the rivers and presently invaded the seas, and
within its primitive courts, within temples grown rich and
leisurely and amidst the gathering medley of the seaport towns
rose speculation and philosophy and science, and the beginning of
the new order that has at last established itself as human life.
Slowly at first, as we traced it, and then with an accumulating
velocity, the new powers were fabricated. Man as a whole did not
seek them nor desire them; they were thrust into his hand. For a
time men took up and used these new things and the new powers
inadvertently as they came to him, recking nothing of the
consequences. For endless generations change led him very
gently. But when he had been led far enough, change quickened the
pace. It was with a series of shocks that he realised at last
that he was living the old life less and less and a new life more
and more.
Already before the release of atomic energy the tensions between
the old way of living and the new were intense. They were far
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