‘This World Is Not Yet Ready.’ We Could Not Find Anyone Who Said It.

BERNE, Switzerland — Item 4 of Session 19 ran forty minutes, took no vote, and was an argument about money.

The sentence everybody quotes from it is not in the record of it.

It is not in the recording secretary's working notebook either. It first appears eight years after the meeting, on page 211 of the third printing of the Proceedings, in a one-line English abstract written under contract by a man who was not in the room, working from a summary of a summary.

What we read

The Committee's records are not sealed and never have been. They sit in a depository that opens three days a week, and the call register shows the Session 19 minute book had been called up nine times since 1961 before we called it up.

We read three things side by side.

The minute book: the verbatim record, forty-one pages for item 4, in the original language.

The recording secretary's working notebook: nine pages of shorthand, taken by Aurel Meszáros-Lindqvist, who died in 1971. His granddaughter keeps six of them in a flat in Trieste, and nobody had asked her for them. We photographed them and had the shorthand transcribed twice, by stenographers who do not know each other. Both transcripts are published here.

And all four printings of the Proceedings, collated line by line.

Where the sentence enters

The 1953 first printing is the record and nothing else. No headnotes, no summaries.

The 1958 second printing corrects eleven typographical errors and adds nothing.

The 1961 third printing is the first to carry English-language abstracts: one line above each item, so a reader who does not read the original can see what the item was about.

The abstract to item 4 reads, entire: This world is not yet ready.

The 1974 fourth printing is a photo-offset of the third, carrying the abstracts across unchanged. It is the edition most libraries hold, and how the line reached everyone who has quoted it since.

Who wrote it

The abstracts were written under contract by Étienne Barrault-Osei, 1911 to 1979, in a rented office in Lausanne. The secretariat has always hired locally for the record, the printing and the translation. That is why the sentence has a Swiss postal address and a fee ledger.

He was paid by the line: 214 of them, at the standard rate for technical abstracting. The ledger survives.

He was not at Session 19. He was not at any session. The despatch note shows what he was sent: a précis of each item, not the record.

Dr. Mireille Achterberg-Sowande, a historian of technical translation, read the abstract against the transcript for us.

"An abstract at one line an item is not a summary of a meeting," she said. "It is a summary of a summary, written to a length. He had forty minutes of argument, a paragraph of précis, and one line to put it in. He wrote a line. It is a good line, which is the whole trouble. Nobody has ever quoted his abstract to item 5."

What item 4 was actually about

A transmission had been received and logged. The question before the Committee was not whether to answer it. The question was whether answering it would commit the Committee, permanently, to a reply channel: an aerial, a crew, a schedule, a budget line that could not be closed while the correspondence continued.

Four delegations spoke. Three of the four speeches are about cost. One delegate asks who will be paying for the aerial in eighty years' time and, on both our transcripts, receives no answer.

There is no vote. Item 4 is referred to a subcommittee on ways and means, which met twice in 1954, produced a costing, and lapsed.

Nobody agreed to pay for the transmitter. So nobody built it. So nothing was sent.

What we counted

We assembled every citation of the sentence we could find: 1,204, in books, papers, broadcast transcripts and three parliamentary debates. One thousand one hundred and fifty-seven attribute it to Session 19.

Sixty-one give a page number. All sixty-one give page 211 — the abstract page, not any page of the record.

Not one cites the transcript, because the sentence is not in the transcript.

What this desk takes from it

Professor Sixten Abelard-Nwosu's reply runs at the foot of this page and is the strongest thing here. He argues that a document commissioned, checked and published by the Committee is the Committee speaking, whoever held the pen. We have printed him entire because we cannot show he is wrong.

What we can show is this. The most quoted sentence attributed to the Committee has no speaker in any record kept at the time. It was written eight years later by a contractor in Lausanne, paid by the line, from a paragraph destroyed in 1968 under a routine retention rule.

The Committee did not find this world unready. The Committee could not agree who would pay for an aerial.

The sentence has outlived the meeting, the delegation, the subcommittee, the précis and the man who wrote it. That is not a suppression. It is a filing system, working as designed.