TECHNOLOGY, WAR, AND GOVERNMENT 543
fulfilment of a prophecy made in the Syriac World in the eighth century
b.c. by the Judaean seer Isaiah:
'The wolf . . . shall dwell with the lamb and the leopard shall lie down
with the kid, and the calf and the young lion and the fading together; and
a little child shall lead them. And the cow and the bear shall feed; their
young ones shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the
ox. And the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned
child shall put his hand on the cockatrice' den. They shall not hurt nor
destroy in all My holy mountain; for the Earth shall be full of the know-
ledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.'1
This Hebrew prophecy had not been left altogether unfulfilled by the
Earth's non-human fauna; for it was a scientifically verified fact that the
beasts of prey did have a habit of granting a' truce to fellow creatures
that were normally their quarry when a drought drove them all to the
same still welling spring, or a forest fire to the same still unscorched
glade, or a flood to the same still unsubmerged holy mountain; and these
habitual signs of grace in the dumb animals' response to the challenge
of emergencies threatening the lives of all creatures alike were the foil
against which a Syriac prophet or a Western naturalist would contem-
plate the twentieth-century spectacle of human carnivores that still
could not or would not bring themselves to enter into a Truce of God>
even when they were being forced to rub shoulders with one another by
the menacing rise of a tide of atomic science round the coasts of a shrink-
ing OikoumenS.
In a.d. 1952 the nearest approach to political co-operation that a
Russian bear and an American eagle found themselves able to make to
one another was their common participation in the activities of the
United Nations Organi2ation. The inability of the two surviving Great
Powers to come closer together than this had been the limiting factor
that had prevented the architects of the constitution of the U.N.O. from
making of it anything more intimate than a forum for international
debate between delegates of the governments of sovereign independent
states, of which three, besides the two titans, were armed with a veto on
resolutions passed by a majority of their fellow states-members. During
the five years of its existence up to date, the U.N.O. had demonstrated
its value, notwithstanding the severity of these limitations, by proving
to be a decidedly more conductive means of political communication
than 'the usual diplomatic channels'. Delegates of the United States
Government and the Soviet Government could still continue to talk to
one another here when the traditional channels of communication had
become choked; and at Lake Success they were parleying in the presence,
and with the participation, of delegates of governments of states of lesser
calibre which, in this forum, had a constitutional right to make their
own voices heard.
These were no mean services to the cause of peace and concord; and
an oecumenical institution that provided these services was one with
which Mankind could not afford to dispense hi their perilous situation
at the time. Yet these merits did not make the U.N.O. capable of be-
i Isa, xi. 6-9.