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.
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