In reviewing briefly this noon the highlights in the history of the United Nations-its early beginnings, its major problems and its outstanding achievements, I am guided by the principle that it is with the lamp of the knowledge of the past that we are enabled not only to evaluate the events of the present but also to contribute to the making of the future. The United Nations is not the first attempt of mankind to set up an international organization to preserve peace. There were many earlier attempts, the most notable of them being the Holy Alliance of 1815, the Concert of Europe, and the League of Nations. In its time, the League of Nations represented the highest development of man's desire for One World. But it had a fatal shortcoming; the United States was not a member and it lacked the coercive power to make its decisions effective and supreme. Born in 1920 the League faced its supreme test in 1931 in Manchuria. Following explosion In which damaged the Manchuria Railway, the Japanese garrison went into blitzkrieg action and in forty-eight hours had seized Mukden, the capital city. Under the pretext of protecting the railway and maintaining peace and order, the Japanese proceeded to occupy the entire country swiftly and systematically. The League sent a Commission to Manchuria headed by the Earl of Lytton to conduct an investigation. The Lytton Commission submitted as its finding the conclusion that Japan was guilty of aggression and should be made to evacuate the country. During the debate on the report before the League Assembly in Geneva the Japanese delegate walked out and Japan repudiated its membership in the League of Nations. While the League called for economic sanctions against the Nippon Empire, the enforcement of sanctions, however, was nominal and ineffectual at best and Japan, instead of suffering punishment, was now free to carry out its aggressive designs in Asia. Gloating over the virtual collapse of the League's first major attempt to coerce a violator of international law into submission, Mussolini moved into Abyssinia, then into Albania. Close on his heels, Hitler began his piecemeal gobbling up of Central and Eastern Europe. Finding themselves in the same company in their disregard of the League and their dedication to aggression, Germany, Italy and Japan formed what came to be known as the Axis Alliance. They were now on their way to divide the world. When the Allies abandoned the policy of appeasement and finally decided to fight, World War II exploded and the League of Nations disappeared in its clouds as an instrument of international cooperation. Perhaps it is by the inexorable design of history that the first major test of the United Nations should have taken place in Korea, a country that adjoins Manchuria. For it seems to indicate that, between 1931 and 1950, a period of two decades, humanity has gone full circle around the globe in its search for peace. There had been, to be sure, many other achievements of the United Nations before Korea. It prevailed upon Pakistan and India to refrain from plunging the Asian sub-continent into a gory conflict. It stopped a shooting war between Indonesia and the Netherlands, and between Israel and some Arab States. With the Commission on Human Rights, it succeeded for the first time in making the peoples of the world speak with one voice in the Declaration of Human Rights, and is now readying the Convention that will give the Declaration a legal force. Through FAO, it has worked with nations to increase food surpluses and reduce food shortages. Through the ILO, the ECAFE, and the various economic agencies, it has brought about wiser utilization of natural and human resources, increased production, stimulated more advantageous trade and exchange, and brought to the working man a sense of dignity and worth not known heretofore. Through the WHO, it has increased life expectancy in many areas, conquered pestilences and epidemies, and liberated whole populations from illness of all sorts. Through the UNICEF, it has brought health to countless children, who, otherwise, would be doomed to early death by disease and malnutrition. And through the UNESCO, it is helping governments in dealing a blow against ignorance in half of the world's population, liberating them not only from fanaticism but bringing to them the boons of science and culture. But the Korean War was its supreme test because Korea threatened to become to the United Nations what Manchuria had been to the League of Nations-its very Nemesis. The United States, as we well know, bore the brunt of the war against Japan. But after the dropping of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and only four days before the Japanese surrendered, Russia hastened to declare war on Japan which was now weakly squirming in its last ditch. The Soviet armies quickly fanned out over Manchuria and Korea. In order to avoid possible clashes between the Russian and American forces and to facilitate the Japanese surrender on the Asian continent, an arbitrary line was drawn, on one side of which the Russians were to accept the surrender of the Japanese troops and on the other side the Americans were to do the same. In Korea the 38th parallel was that dividing line. It was the intention, after the surrender would be completed and the projected United Nations was ready to function, to set up Korean self-government through a popular election supervised by the United Nations. But no sooner had the 38th parallel been designated as the dividing line than the Russians dropped on it an impenetrable Iron Curtain, kept out the United Nations Korean Commission, set up a communist government in North Korea, and trained and armed its manpower for war. It then made an ostentatious display of withdrawing its own army and demanded a similar withdrawal by the United States from South Korea. The United Nations Commission supervised a popular election in Southern Korea and helped set up the Rhee government after which the American forces withdrew, not without misgivings. On June 26, 1950, the free world was electrified by the report that North Korean forces had rolled over the 38th parallel in full force and, equipped with heavy Russian-made tanks and guns, had invaded South Korea. It looked as if another Manchuria was in the making. But whoever started the Korean incident did a very poor job of calculation. America had in nearby Japan sizable armed forces under the command of one of its most brilliant generals, Douglas MacArthur. Washington instructed the American delegates to the Security Council in Lake Success to present a resolution calling for immediate United Nations police action in Korea, which, because of the absence of the Russian delegate who had recently walked out of the Council, was passed by an overwhelming majority. The United Nations forces in Korea were not very formidable in any measure of reckoning. What was more significant than the strength of these forces was the fact not often realized that the United Nations possesses the potential military strength that the League of Nations lacked and the absence of which led to its collapse. What was more significant was the fact that has become crystal-clear since Korea: that even the most ruthless would-be world conquerors can be deterred from carrying out their aggressive designs if the majority of the states constituting the United Nations are determined to prove that there exists in the world a vigilant world public opinion that is ready, through the United Nations, to materialize into armed police action whenever and wherever needed. This, to my mind, is the most significant gain of the United Nations in its efforts to prevent war and preserve peace. The United Nations Association of the Philippines has been organized to help obtain support for the United Nations, its principles and its objectives, as well as to help combat the feeling of indifference which is gradually supplanting the spirit of hope and promise in which the United Nations was conceived ten years ago. I wonder whether this indifference may not be the real tragedy as well as the cause of the failure of our generation. The potency of man's belief, the unconquerableness of his spirit, and the invincibility of his will have been and will be the builder and genesis of all those moral, spiritual and material accretions that make for a civilization.

What man believes in will eventually survive, and the firmer his belief, the greater the chances for the realization and actualization of that which he believes in. This indifference-should it spread, as well it may, if not effectively combatted-may insidiously and slowly but quite effectively render the United Nations weak and moribund. And should this lamentable event come to pass, then indeed have we as a generation failed, and our failure may mean our Gotterdammerung - a "twilight of the gods" more horrible than any Wagner ever envisioned. No, the United Nations must not die. We must continue to believe in it, not with that unreasonable, miracle-expecting optimism of 1945, but with more rational and realistic faith premised upon the knowledge that it is still in its infancy and must therefore be nurtured into growth carefully and realized. In that process of growth, it must be it can make mistakes, fail in some ways, but it itself will remain and must remain firm and unshakable, for the vision and the dream of which it is the tangible expression is compounded of the deepest beliefs and highest aspirations of mankind.