H. Wells - The World Set Free

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 desirethem; 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 growingclear 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 jealousyof 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

responsibleand understandingpeople 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 mindsand

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 fearof itself, and a consequent directness

that gave it a general distinction. There was, of course, a

noblesimplicity about Leblanc, but even of him it may be asked

whether he was not rather goodand honest-minded than in the

fuller sense great.

The ex-king had wisdomand 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 himselfand 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 wisdomof Leblanc, it had a

certain Olympian quality, and the natural tendency of the human

mindto 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 conditionof 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 limitedwhen one measures it by later standards,

and it was now in a stateof the direst confusionand distress.

It must be rememberedthat 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 grownupon

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

darker shading as to give an impression that homo sapiens was an

amphibious animal. His roads and railways lay also along the

lower contours, only here and there to pierce some mountain

barrier or reach some holiday resort did they clamber above 3000

feet. And across the ocean his traffic passed in definite lines;

there were hundreds of thousands of square miles of ocean no ship

ever traversed except by mischance.

Into the mysteries of the solid globe under his feet he had not

yet pierced for five miles, and it was still not forty years

since, with a tragic pertinacity, he had clambered to the poles

of the earth. The limitless mineral wealth of the Arctic and