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
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 grown upon 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.
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