THE UNIVERSE OF INFORMATION.pdf - ideals

necessary conditions will have to be fulfilled before we can take them.
Anyhow, international associations assume a new status in our eyes
and the Secretariat can deal with them more intimately. Don't you
think this is a decided step forward?
One more immediate question... subsidy to the International University.
You wrote of it in your letter to me and I observed the same
point in your letter to M. Hymans. You may well imagine that the
Council, not to speak of the Secretariat, has been approached by
several associations for subventions and other forms of material assistance.
You must have seen in the Council's resolution granting;.£ 1,500 to
the Union that a reason was especially given for justifying it, namely,
that you could do at less expense the work which the Secretariat would
have to do itself... the general principle arrived at (in the Secretariat)
is that subventions are a bad policy. We had to refuse two or three
applications which came from very influential quarters. I do not see
any possibility for the present of a subvention to the International
University. I rather think M. Hymans knew this and merely abstained
from mentioning it at the meeting. 38
Otlet's reply was typical and suggests how confident he
had been of a different outcome from the Council's deliberations.
He had'underlined certain words in Nitobe's text such as
«premature» and «despair». A draft reply in Otlet's hand
contained manuscript corrections by La Fontaine. There can
be no doubt of the impact of the Council's decision and of
Nitobe's letter on him, the sudden access of bitterness about
the utility at all of the League, dominated as it seemed to
be by a Council of great powers, its multitudinous assembly
weak and ineffective by comparison:
Your letter will mark a date in our history. It is a deception, a great
deception that only one thing lessens, the manner, the profound manner
in which you act towards the idea, the warmly sympathetic manner
with which you treat our persons, the consideration of the forms
which the Council and its members have expressed. The deception is
great because the great rock that we have tried to get to the top of
the mountain has fallen heavily back. Sysyphus knew this — and we
also. It is not the first rock-fall, only those before weighed less because
our effort through the years has added increasingly to the substance...
Certainly our work will not be lessened. But the rock, the poor
tumbled rock, despite its robustness, is going to experience much ill
and risk of breaking and crumbling.
The idea comes to this: to give a place to the things of the mind, in
the new order beside those that have monopolised the powerful; and
with money, to have this place taken by the League of Nations itself,
that new organism which was born so much in hope and which is an
idea, an idea at the same time as it is a concrete institution, which
incorporates the idea and makes it real.
Alas! At Geneva already, before the great political problems of the
moment, the Assembly has hesitated, it has failed. And now before
all the great intellectual problems, the Council in its turn does not
know how to take a resolution. Believe me that it is saddening to be
present at the spectacle of the day revealed by this very morning's
papers: a twenty line account of the activities of the League drowned
in the deluge of information about the activities of the Council...
Yes! This is very much the Supreme Council, which will continue to
rule human affairs by force, by ruses, and in secret, for the benefit
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