Difficulties . . .

The talk is bound to go on as long as conferences are held; for after all conferences are held so that people may be able to confer. There is bound to be even more talk than in a national conference or a national parliament, simply because of the nature of words and of the assumptions behind the words, which are different for New Zealanders, or Frenchmen, or Swedes, or Americans, or Ecuadorians. Even with the most skilful technique of translation, people are bound to get at cross purposes; and in the face of incomprehension there is bound to be intrigue, pacts about voting, struggles over non-essentials of phraseology, honest indignation. One could take half a dozen separate instances off-hand as the test for an improving dissertation on national psychology; and indeed, until one gets an awareness of this snag in the way of international co-operation, one cannot work to full value. The same thing, I understand, gets in the way of efficient functioning of the Secretariat; a man of large experience told me that no international Civil Service can hope to work with more than about thirty per cent of the efficiency of a national civil service. This may be an underestimate as far as the "hope" is concerned; after all, international civil services only go back to the League of Nations, and efficient national civil services have taken a long while to build up. The wonder perhaps is, that certain departments of the Unesco Secretariat work so well. I think inevitably of the Education Department, for that was knocked into shape by a New Zealander, Beeby. and let me remark in this place that the world was fortunate to get Beeby as Assistant Director-General in Charge of Education when it did. Those eighteen months made all the difference. Make no doubt about it. Beeby is an international figure of some note. Those hostile to our Education Department in New Zealand, please assimilate. The difficulty is to get similar men, at once enormously able and quite disinterested, to run other departments. There are men, but they generally have other jobs already, and conflicts of allegiance arise continually. Until there is a first-rate team of such men, able, honest, diplomatic, and with a capacity for putting first things first, Unesco will not be working as it should.