T n HIRTY years on, growing older and older, Shorter in wind, as in memory long, Feeble of foot, and rheumatic of shoulder, What will it help you that once you were strong? I did not go to school at Harrow, so no reverence for that suburban establishment restrains me from lopping a decade off the time-span mentioned in its school song and making it serve as a text, of sorts, for this article. Thirty years ago, in London, in January 1946, the first sessions of the main organs of the United Nations were held. The General Assembly first assembled on January 10, in the aptly egalitarian setting of the Methodist Central Hall. The Security Council first went into council a week later, neatly demonstrating its more select quality by meeting not in the odour of Methody but over the road in the Anglicans' Church House. The fact that both sites were within a short walk of the Houses of Parliament and Downing Street may have contributed to the tendency to regard the Assembly as a world parliament and the Council as a world cabinet. Neither was either. Thirty years later, the fact that the UN is 'growing older and older' is perhaps the only point that can be made about it without getting into any controversy. Yet this fact is itself an astonishing one. To grow older, one must remain alive. And it was possible for a perfectly respectable London journal to tell its readers that ' Every honest and realistic person knows in his heart that the United Nations is dead' as far back as 1947-only a year after those first London sessions. Today, however, any dispute about whether the UN is still alive can be very quickly settled by reference to the conclusive evidence provided by the people who, in the circumstances, are the best possible witnesses: its sharpest critics. All their complaints against it may be grouped under two simple heads. Either they complain about its failure to do things which they feel it ought to do; or they complain about it doing things which they feel it ought not to do. Common to both groups is the underlying (however distasteful) recognition that it exists. A comparison with the League of Nations reveals a striking difference in several dimensions. The League held the first of its meetings in 1920. Less than twenty years later these meetings had ceased. As early as 1933, contraction had set in when two major powers, Germany and Japan, withdrew from membership; and the League had never come within sight of universality, the United States refusing at the 67