UN General Assembly
1948

Mr. Balaguer affirmed, in conclusion, his faith in the work of the United Nations. That Organization was the only ark afloat amid universal shipwreck, the only legacy of human solidarity left to a sceptical and ruined world that had survived the horrors of war, and it would, as the Secretary-General had so well said in his report, undoubtedly serve to bring the great Powers together and lead them to continue the conversations begun at San Francisco. But it also served, and that was of great importance, to keep alive the vacillating faith of the small nations in justice and right. The representatives of all the free peoples of the world, when they returned every year after a session of the Assembly, carried back to their own countries fewer hopes than they had had when they set out. But, despite their discouragement, when they summed up the work accomplished yearly on behalf of peace and realized that nothing positive had been done, they nevertheless preserved intact their faith in international justice, because for weeks on end they had been present at discussions in which the powerful nations had bowed on many occasions, in obedience to the provisions of the Charter, before the will of countries which lacked the power to make themselves heard on the field of battle, and because they knew that the very existence of the United Nations was in itself a guarantee of order and a call to reason in the midst of universal anxiety and anarchy.