Eternal Machine

Tomorrow, the fifty-one sovereign states of the United Nations General Assembly will meet on ground that seven years ago was dedicated to the "World of Tomorrow." Here through all the skepticism, the haggling and the hot tempers, is another dedication to the future. Here, in once-swampy Flushing meadow is the machinery that may be the only effective antidote to the atom bomb, to germ warfare, to rocket missiles. Here, for all the uncertainly, intolerance, and misunderstanding, lies the last hope.

It has become fashionable of late to distrust all organizations of nations. Conditioned by the failures of their fathers, this generation has come to sneer easily at the attempts of men to compromise. In a sense, a degree of healthy cynicism may prove to be the attitude under which controversial countries can best conciliate. Twenty years ago a spiritual failure of the League of Nations was the generally blithe assumption that the "spade would work by itself." The inability to understand that an assembly of states is only a tool which must be used by its members was the flaw that destroyed Wilson's dream.

Differences must be met by "conciliation and not a yielding by one state to the arbitrary will of the other," said Secretary of State Byrnes in his recapitulation of the Paris Peace Conference. In time perhaps, the harshly discordant tone of West-15, East-6, which marked every refrain at the Conference, will become a sonorous harmony. The proposal by Australia and Cuba to eliminate the veto power of the Big Five on the Security council, the question of an International Refugee Organization, and the Russian plan for the dissemination of information on the armed forces of member nations in neutral countries, are controversial issues on which the still infant U.N. will continue to cut its teeth.

The General Assembly of the United Nations, a clearing-house for the opinions of member countries can be persuasive or forceful in the adjustment of international problems. The instrument is as effective in its potentialities as its destructive counterpart--the fissionable atom. But for all the prayers offered up to a good of peace, and for all the prophesies of professional well-wishes, the United Nations, as Secretary General Trygve Lie said,". . . is no stronger than the elective will of the nations that support it. Of itself it can do nothing."