PROSPECTS OF THE WESTERN CIVILIZATION

XII. THE PROSPECTS OF THE WESTERN CIVILIZATION

XXXIX. THE NEED FOR THIS INQUIRY

XL. THE INCONCLUSIVENESS OF A Priori ANSWERS

XLI. THE TESTIMONIES OF THE HISTORIES OF THE CIVILIZATIONS

(1) Western Experiences with Non-Western Precedents
(2) Unprecedented Western Experiences

(II) THE SITUATION AFTER THE SECOND WORLD WAR
(a) A PROGRESSIVE CONCENTRATION OF POWER
The Significance of Hitler's Bid for World-Dominion
(III) ALTERNATIVE POSSIBLE APPROACHES TO WORLD ORDER

(IV) POSSIBLE CONSTITUENT ELEMENTS OF A FUTURE WORLD ORDER
(V) PROBABLE FUNCTIONS OF A FUTURE WORLD ORDER
E. TECHNOLOGY, CLASS-CONFLICT AND EMPLOYMENT

(1) THE ORIGIN AND NATURE OF THE PROBLEM

(2) Mechanization and Private Enterprise
(3) Alternative Approaches and Social Harmony
(4) Possible Costs of Social Justice
(5) Living happy ever after?



D. TECHNOLOGY, WAR, AND GOVERNMENT
(I) THE ORIGIN AND NATURE OF THE PROBLEM

{XI.D.I. p. 473} THE problem with which the heirs of a Western Civilization were being confronted by the institution of War in A.D. 1952 had been set by the impact of an unprecedentedly potent latter-day Western technique on a literally world-wide Westernizing Society that was still articulated into a plurality of parochial states, since these states were still at liberty—and, because individually free, were collectively under pressure of a mutual fear and competition—to continue to go to war with one another as the penalty for being still severally sovereign and independent.

This problem was, as we have seen, by no means peculiar in itself to the Western World in the twentieth century of the Christian Era; it had likewise beset, in their day, all the civilizations that by this time were demonstrably extinct, fossilized, petrified, or moribund; but, as we have also observed, the extreme difference of degree between a latter-day Western and a previous human mastery over Non-Human Nature was tantamount to a difference in kind, because the additional 'drive’ that it had put into the traditional institution of War had heightened the hazard of War for Humanity from a limited to an unlimited risk. In the situation as it was in A.D. 1952 the continuance of a possibility of War was no longer only a menace to the survival of another man-made institution, the now oecumenical Western Society. Since the invention of the atomic bomb and the incubation of further, and perhaps still more deadly, new weapons, War had also become a menace to the survival of all human beings implicated in this society—and, by the time of writing, the membership of the Western Civilization on the technological and military planes had come to include the entire living generation of the Human Race.

(II) THE SITUATION AFTER THE SECOND WORLD WAR

(a) A PROGRESSIVE CONCENTRATION OF POWER

{XI.D.II.(a) p. 473} On the morrow of the Second World War, a World that had now been unified within a Western framework found itself in the midst of a revolution generated and propelled by the double shock of two blows dealt by a Western technology that had been raised to an unprecedented degree of potency. The impact of Technology on the Human Psyche had detonated two world wars within twenty-five years of one another and had thereby reduced the number of the Great Powers in a Western system of international relations from eight to two within the thirty-one years 1914-45. The impact of Technology on Mankind's means of communication had brought these two surviving Great Powers within
{p.474} point-blank range of one another round the circumference of the globe by 'annihilating distance’. The situation thus created was so formidable, as well as so novel, that it called for a closer analysis.

The deadliness of the rate of the casualties among the Great Powers during these first thirty-one years of a new bout of Western warfare was grimly evident in retrospect. It was now clear that political and military power—and, by implication, economic power as well, in an industrialized and mechanized world—were being concentrated at a headlong pace; and the effect of a now manifest tendency upon its victims' minds and feelings was the sharper inasmuch as this dominant undercurrent of international affairs had been concealed, in and after the peace-settlement following the General War of A.D. 1914-18, by a short-lived tendency in the opposite direction that, at the time, had been conspicuous¹ just because it had been superficial.

By breaking up one Great Power, the Danubian Hapsburg Monarchy, and one ci-devant Great Power, the Ottoman Empire, and temporarily maiming and crippling two other Great Powers, Germany and Russia, the War of AJD. 1914-18 had permitted a previously dammed-back wave of Nationalism—rampant among politically un-unified and un-liberated peoples who had been dazzled by the historic success of the classical nation-states of Modern Western Europe²—to increase, at those four stricken Powers' expense, the number of the states of a medium and a small calibre in the Western international comity. During the preceding forty-three-years-long lull (durabat A.D. 1871-1914) between the end of the aftermath of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and the outbreak of the First World War, the political unification of Italy and of Germany had reduced the number of the lesser states in the Western system to a minimum and had indeed temporarily removed from the map all remaining states of a medium calibre with the sole exception of Spain. In the peace-settlement of A.D. 1919-21 this medium class of states had been reintroduced on to the political map by the reconstitution of Poland and by the aspiration of Brazil to have outgrown the stature of a small state even if she might not yet be deemed to have attained the dimensions of a Great Power.³

In the constitution of the League of Nations the success of the lesser states' self-assertion during the first decade after the close of the First World War had been registered in A.D. 1922 in the raising of the number of non-permanent seats on the Council from the provisional minority figure, originally agreed in A.D. 1919, of four, as against the minimum number of five permanent seats then reserved for Great Powers,⁴ to the majority figure of six, as against four;⁵ and in A.D. 1926 the Great Powers

¹ See Toynbee, A. J.: The World after the Peace Conference (London 1925, Milford), pp. 24-43, especially the comparative table, on pp. 32-34, of states, below the rank of Great Powers, which were playing an active part in international affairs before and after the War of A.D. 1914-18.
² See IV. iv. 185-90.
³ See Toynbee, A. J., op, cit., pp. 35-36, and Toynbee, A. J., and Boulter, V. M.: Survey of International Affairs, 1926 (London 1928, Milford), p. 21.
⁴ See the original text of Article 4 of the Covenant of the League of Nations.
⁵ See Toynbee, A. J., and Boulter, V. M.: Survey of International Affairs, 1926 (1928, Milford), pp. 10-14.

{p.475} on the Council had been prevented by the minor states' obstruction from securing Germany's admission to membership in the League with a permanent seat on the Council until they had consented to pay the price of agreeing to the institution of three 'semi-permanent' seats for the benefit of Poland and other medium-sized states of her kind.¹ The Wilsonian illusion, thus created, that the comity of states was being 'democratized', had been fostered at the time by the self-restraint of the three Great Powers—France, Great Britain, and the United States—that had emerged from the First World War as temporary victors; for it had been incompatible with these Powers' principles, and not imperative for their interests, to treat the lesser states very high-handedly.

The brutal truth that had been hidden under this amiable but brittle mask had, however, been quickly exposed by the resurgence of Germany under a National-Socialist régime; and, after a criminal Power that had taken full advantage of having been let off lightly in the Paris peace-settlement of A.D. 1919—20 had paid in A.D. 1945 for her abominable crimes by being first blasted, then invaded, and finally dismembered like the Hapsburg Monarchy in A.D. 1918, it had become clear that the significant event in the First World War had been the destruction of the weakest of the Great Powers of the day, not the spawning of a litter of new minor states. The temporary erection of minor states in a political vacuum produced by the break-up or mutilation of former Great Powers, so far from militating against the concentration of power, had created an opportunity for it. The nominal 'liberation’ of 'successor-states’ had indeed been illusory from first to last. They had been created to be enslaved; for no other fate than enslavement could await minor states, new or old, in a world in which the concentration of power was being ordained inexorably by Technology's relentless progress.

In this world, states of anything less than the highest calibre were not any longer either economically or militarily or politically 'viable'; their presence on the map was an invitation to an aggressor, and the opportunity had been perceived by Hitler's intuitive genius and had been exploited by his criminal lust for power as a key that was to open for Germany her way to a world-wide domination. Hitler's strategy of aggression had been to equip Germany with the material resources for dominating the World by capturing the defenceless pawns that had taken the ci-devant Hapsburg and Romanov Empires' places on a Central and East European political chess-board; and his eventual catastrophic failure to win for a Third German Reich this Hapsburg and Romanov heritage had merely bequeathed to the Soviet Union the chance of snatching out of a slain Third Reich's dead hands, and concentrating in her own giant grasp, the whole of the Hohenzollern Empire's, as well as the Hapsburg and Romanov Empires', legacy of 'successor-states' as far west as the Elbe, Thuringia, and the Boehmerwald.

This progressive liquidation, since A.D. 1938, of the successor-states of destroyed or mutilated Great Powers in Central and Eastern Europe had indicated what the fate of all other successor-states in other regions was likely to be, The only reason why West Germany and South-West

¹ See ibid., pp. 16-78.

{p.476} Austria had not, by A.D. 1952, yet followed East Germany and North East Austria into Russia's maw was that these two other fragments of dismembered a Third Reich had come meanwhile under the control the United States and her West European allies Great Britain and France; and by this date it had become clear that the substitution of a United States protectorate for an untenable independence was the only insurance against Russian domination that promised to be effective in the long run for any state anywhere in the World.

This role, which was a new role for the United States in the Old World, was a familiar role of hers in the New World; for the substitute of a covert for an overt subjection through a process of nominal liberation was a tragi-comedy that, before being played in Central and Eastern Europe between A.D. 1918 and A.D. 1945, had been played in Latin America more than a hundred years earlier, between A.D. 1810 and A.D. 1823. From the days of the Holy Alliance to the days of the Third Reich the Monroe Doctrine had saved the successor-states of the Spanish Empire in the Americas from falling under the domination of some other Continental European Power at the price of replacing a Spanish imperial administration by a United States political hegemony, that had been none the less effective for being exercised light-handedly, and a no less alien economic ascendancy that had been enjoyed for a hundred years by the United Kingdom before this, too, had passed into North American hands. Since the reversal of the ratio of the relative strength of the United States and Great Britain as a result of Great Britain's lo and the United States' gain, in economic strength in the War of A.D. 1914-18, the underwriting of the Monroe Doctrine by British sea-power had ceased to be a necessity for the United States at the moment wt it had ceased to be a possibility for the British Empire.

In a nineteenth-century Western World in which all the Great Powers except Great Britain had been situated on the European peninsula of I Eurasian Continent, the sea-power of the United Kingdom had *cidentally screened the Americas in the act of screening the British Island the Transoceanic possessions of the British Crown against danger of attack by any other Great Power then in existence. The temporarily favourable politico-geographical situation that had made it possible for the British Navy thus to provide strategic security for the enl English-speaking and overseas world had, however ceased to be: when, at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries of the Christian Era, two new Great Powers—the United States herself and Japan—had arisen outside the British naval cordon round Continental Europe at the moment when, from within the cordon, British naval supremacy was being challenged by Germany; and the United Kingdom's inability in these radically altered circumstances, to continue to give effective naval protection to the whole of the British Empire, not to speak of the United States and the Latin American republics, had been demonstrated in the course of half a century ending in A.D. 1945.

Even before the outbreak of the First World War, the challenge from Germany had constrained Great Britain to seek a reinforcement of her naval strength—in the Pacific and the Indian Ocean by enter
{p.477} into an alliance with Japan in A.D.1902 and in European waters by making an entente with France in A.D. 1904. In the Second World War, in which both the Japanese and the Italian Navy had gone into action on the anti-British side, even the countervailing aid of the by this time immense sea-power of the United States had not enabled British sea-power to save Hong Kong, Malaya, and the Dutch Empire in Indonesia from being temporarily overrun by the Japanese at a time when the whole strength of the British Navy was having to be employed nearer home on the three-fold task of holding the Levant, screening Great Britain herself from invasion, and keeping open the western approaches to the British Isles. In other words, the British Empire's tribulations during the Second World War had proved conclusively that, on the strategic plane, the British Empire was now no longer the unitary Power that it had been so long as the sea-power of the United Kingdom had been able effectively to protect the whole of the Empire, from its frontage on the North Sea and the English Channel to its frontage on the China Seas inclusive; and this dissolution of the British Empire's former strategic unity had been discounted on the political plane in advance, A British statesmanship that had never forgotten the lesson of Great Britain's disastrous intransigence towards her North American colonies in A.D. 1775-83 had been forestalling the violent break-up that had been the Spanish, the Ottoman, and the Danubian Hapsburg Empire's fate by transforming the British Empire into a Commonwealth of fully self-governing states since A.D. 1867, 1848, 1841, or even as early as 1791 if the local landmarks in the constitutional history of Canada are taken as indicators of the progress of political devolution in the British Empire as a whole.¹

The voluntary, gradual, and pacific transformation of a once unitary empire into a free association between an ever-increasing number of fully self-governing states had been a triumph of good feeling and good sense which was perhaps almost unique in the political annals of Mankind in Process of Civilization up to date; and this political achievement reflected credit on the parties that had been willing to receive self-government in instalments, as well as on the party that had been willing to make progressive cessions of political power on its own initiative without waiting to be compelled. The creditableness of the political process in this British case could not, however, prevent the political effect of a dissolution of the British Empire by agreement from being much the same, in the stark terms of power politics, as the political effect of the break-up of the Spanish, Ottoman, and Danubian Hapsburg Empires by force. In this case, as in those, the effect had been the creation of a dangerous political vacuum which the champions of a dissolving Hapsburg Monarchy had diagnosed and deprecated when they had given it the pejorative nickname 'Balkanization' in allusion to the sequel to the previous break-up of the Ottoman Empire in Rumelia. The hard fact was that, by A.D. 1952, the sea-power of the United Kingdom

¹ A convenient list of the dates when responsible government was granted in the various British colonies with populations of West European origin will be found in Nathan, M.: Empire Government (London 1918, Allen & Unwin), pp, 47-48.

{p.478} had ceased to be able, unaided, to protect the United Kingdom itself or what remained of its dependent empire, while the other now fully self-governing dominions of the British Crown, which had ceased to be able to count upon effective protection by the United Kingdom's Navy, had not become capable, unaided, of providing for their own security; and this meant that all continuing or former states members of the British Commonwealth, like all Continental European states west of the Soviet Union's 'iron curtain', must become protectorates of the United States as the only practicable alternative to their becoming satellites of the Soviet Union.

This was another way of saying that, in A.D. 1952, the Soviet Union and the United States found themselves confronting one another as the only two Great Powers still surviving on the face of the planet; and, in any international balance of power, two was bound, even at the best, to be an awkward number. It was true that in this current chapter of Western international history—in contrast to the situation during the chapter that had been opened in A.D. 1931 by Japan's initial act of aggression in Manchuria and had been closed in A.D, 1945 by the overthrow of both Japan and Germany—the two rival Great Powers were, both of them, economically 'sated’ countries, either of which could find peaceful employment for the whole of its man-power, for many decades to come, in cultivating its own garden and developing the still untouched reserves of human and non-human resources within its own frontiers; and in this respect the international situation was less dangerous in A.D. 1952 than it had been before and during the Second World War, when Germany and Japan had been led into committing aggression by their belief that they could not continue to provide for a growing population at an acceptable standard of living within their own frontiers. By contrast, both the United States and the Soviet Union enjoyed, and admitted to enjoying, in A.D. 1952, a freedom from want that made both these surviving Great Powers immune to one of the historic motives for aggressiveness. Unfortunately, however, they did not, either of them, enjoy an equal freedom from the mutual fear that had been the other powerful motive for aggressiveness in the past; and their fear of one another was engendered and kept alive by the convergent operation of several different causes.

To begin with, the Russian and American peoples differed in êthos. The Russian people's habitual and characteristic temper was one of docile resignation, the American people's one of obstreperous impatience; and this difference of temper was reflected in a difference of attitude towards arbitrary government. The Russians acquiesced in this as an evil that some six hundred years of experience had schooled them to regard as inevitable, whereas the Americans' experience of successfully revolting against arbitrary government by ministers of a British King George III and successfully preventing any domestic recrudescence of arbitrary government during the first century and three quarters of the history of the United States had led them to think of arbitrary government as an evil which any people could banish if it had the will. In consequence, the Americans—including a middle-class-
{p.479} minded American industrial working class—saw their summum bonum in a liberty that they equated with equality, whereas a Russian Communist dominant minority saw their summum bonum in an equality that they equated with liberty. These temperamental and doctrinal differences made it difficult for the two peoples to understand, and therefore difficult for them to trust, one another; and this inevitable mutual distrust bred a no-less-inevitable mutual fear in the hearts of the two strong men armed, now that the arena in which they menaced one another had been transformed out of all recognition by the unprecedentedly rapid and far-reaching recent progress of Technology in Western hands.

The Significance of Hitler's Bid for World-Dominion

{XI.D.II(c), p. 500} The opportunity for political crime on an oecumenical scale which had been opened up by a recession of Militarism in Western Europe had indeed been visible to Hitler as early as the morrow of the First World War.

Hitler had perceived that, in a World whose peoples were all now miserably war-weary and war-shy, world-dominion might be the easy prize of any nation that could still be coaxed, duped, doped, or flogged by an audacious demagogue or despot into being one degree less unwarlike than its neighbours. 'In the realm of the blind the one-eyed man is king.’ On the strength of this intuition Hitler had cold-bloodedly remilitarized Germany and then attacked Poland, four small West European countries, and France; and the sensationally successful results of these successive criminal acts had testified to the correctness of Hitler's calculations up to that point. The German people, for the second time in one lifetime, had duly allowed themselves, not only to be used by a German Government as instruments for the commission of an international crime, but to be induced to play this criminal role with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength;⁴ a Polish people that had remained exceptional in having lost nothing of its martial spirit had been overwhelmed by a German aggressor's crushing superiority on the plane of Military Technology; and the collapse of Hitler's West European victims had justified Hitler's thesis that, in the state of mind and feeling then prevalent in Western Europe, a small margin of superiority in martial spirit might earn for a boldly wicked aggressor a fabulous dividend in military conquests. Hitler was reported to have said, and this not in jest, that all good pacifists ought to wish him success because the con-

¹ Aeschylus: Agamemnon, 1. 177, quoted in this Study, passim.
² Heb. xii. 6.
³ Put your trust in God, my boys, and keep your powder dry' (Blacker, Valentine: Oliver's Advice).
⁴ Mark xii. 30.

{p.501} centration of a monopoly of military and political power in Germany's hands was the only practical means, in the World as it was, of translating the ideals of Pacifism into reality. Hitler was, in truth, offering the World, at his own price, a commodity—freedom from fear of further world wars—of which Mankind stood in dire need, and for which they were therefore already prepared to pay dear.

In psychological principle, therefore, the business of world-conquest on which Hitler had embarked was as 'sound' as it was immoral; and, if in the event this would-be world-conqueror, so far from making Germany's and his own political fortune, brought down upon his Third Reich and upon himself a disaster that eclipsed the previous downfall of the Hohenzollern Reich and Dynasty, this was because Hitler was guilty of two fatal errors, of which the second, at any rate, might have been avoidable.

The builder of a Third Reich who had also been the creator of National Socialism had made the price of a Pax Teutonica so intolerably high in requiring submission to a Nazi German domination that, at the first glimmer of a prospect that this tyranny might ultimately be foiled and overthrown, resistance movements sprang up in even the tamest of the countries that Hitler's armies had overrun, while a British people which had allowed its governing class to practise 'appeasement' towards Japan, Italy, and Germany from A.D. 1931 to 1939 falsified the not irrational expectations that Hitler had founded on his observation of this decidedly un-martial and apparently persistent British temper by refusing to accept peace at Hitler's price even when the collapse and capitulation of France in A.D. 1940 had left Britain fighting on alone without any apparent prospect of staving off imminent defeat and subjugation.

Hitler's second fatal error was his abandonment of a hitherto brilliantly successful policy of administering his aggression to his victims in successive doses nicely 'calculated to be, each time, just not too large for a docile patient to swallow; and this error looks like a gratuitous one, since an historian cannot descry any contemporary change in the international situation that could have forced Hitler's hand in this crucial issue. By his seizure of Bohemia and Moravia on the night of the 15th-16th March, 1939, Hitler made it certain that, when he went on to attack Poland, he would find himself this time at war with Great Britain as well; by ensuring the belligerency of Great Britain, he converted a local war into a general war; by thus bringing on a general war, he ensured the eventual intervention of the United States (whatever assistance his Japanese accomplices might or might not eventually give in driving the United States into belligerency); and, by thus condemning Germany, sooner or later, to be smitten by the full force of an industrial war-potential in the United States that amounted to more than half the aggregate industrial war-potential of the whole World at the tune, Hitler was condemning Germany to receive a knock-out blow. Moreover, as if this chain of inevitable and inevitably fatal consequences of a false step taken on the 15th March, 1939, was not enough to make sure of Hitler's frustrating his own purposes, he gratuitously attacked the Soviet Union
{p.502} after he had failed to subdue Great Britain and had succeeded in moving the United States to convert herself into 'the arsenal of Democracy’.

It will be seen that Hitler's eventual failure to impose peace on the World by force of arms was due, not to any flaw in his thesis that the World was ripe for conquest, but to an accidental combination of incidental errors in his measures for putting into execution a nefarious grand design that, in itself, was a feasible scheme for profiting by a correctly diagnosed psychological situation. A twentieth-century World, that had thus, in A.D. 1933-45, been reprieved, thanks only to a chapter of lucky accidents, from a fate which Mankind's patently increasing defeatism and submissiveness had almost provocatively invited, could hardly count upon any future would-be world-conqueror's being so clumsy as to let the same easy prey escape for the second time by allowing himself to blunder in his turn into an Hitlerian combination of egregious errors; and, if a future follower in Hitler's footsteps was unlikely to make Hitler's mistakes, he could, on the other hand, be sure of profiting by his Nazi forerunner's pioneer work in clearing the ground for a successor to cultivate; for, in failing by so narrow a margin to win the prize of world-dominion for himself, Hitler had left the prize dangling within the reach of any successor capable of pursuing the same aim of world-conquest with a little more patience, prudence, and tact.

The yeoman service that Hitler had performed for some future architect of a Pax Oecumenica was his historic achievement of forcing an oecumenical society that had already been devastated by one world war to inflict upon itself, within the lifetime of the generation that had been smitten by that shattering catastrophe, a Second World War that had brought still more grievous tribulations upon the World at large, and especially upon Europe. An Hitlerian 'revolution of destruction'¹ was an irrevocably accomplished fact by the time when Hitler came to grief; and the collapse of all Hitler's designs for the aggrandizement of Germany left this negative result of his criminal career intact. In A.D. 1953 it was manifest that, in failing to win world-dominion for his own abortive Third German Reich, Hitler had bequeathed, to any successor with the ability to take advantage of this opportunity, the legacy that Assyria had bequeathed to the Achaemenidae, Ts'in She Hwang-ti to Han Liu Pang, and Pompey and Caesar to Augustus.² Hitler, finding the peoples of a twentieth-century Westernizing World already psychologically devastated by the experience of one world war, had left them more than doubly devastated by a more harrowing repetition of the same experience within the same lifetime. A field that in A.D. 1914-18 had been scored by trenches and pitted with shell-holes had been ploughed up by bulldozers and effaced by bomb-craters in A.D. 1939-45. An Oikoumenê that in August 1914 had been under cultivation as a chequer-board of national allotments had now become a waste-land open to a unitary occupation. For a post-Hitlerian empire-builder, Hitler's derelict legacy was a gift of the Gods.

¹ Rauschning, H.: Germany's Revolution of Destruction. English translation (London 1930, Heinemann).
² See V. vi. 186-7.

(III) ALTERNATIVE POSSIBLE APPROACHES TO WORLD ORDER

{XII.D.III, p. 524} Our foregoing survey of the situation after the Second World War has shown that, at the opening of the second half of the twentieth century of the Christian Era, a Westernizing World found itself in a plight that can be summarily described as follows. Three recent achievements of Western technology—the coalescence and simultaneous shrinkage of the Oikoumenê and the invention of atomic weapons—had made it imperative for Man in Process of Civilization to abolish War; War could not be abolished unless the control of atomic energy employable for military purposes could be concentrated in the hands of some single political authority; this monopoly of the command of the master-weapon of the age would enable, and, in enabling, compel, the authority controlling atomic energy to assume the role of an oecumenical government; the seat of this oecumenical government must be either Washington or Moscow in the constellation of political forces that had emerged from the overthrow of Germany and Japan in A.D. 1945; but in A.D. 1952 neither the United States nor the Soviet Union was prepared voluntarily to place itself at the mercy of its sole surviving peer by submitting, without fighting, to seeing this rival arrogate to itself the world-wide political ascendency that would be conferred automatically on either Power by a monopoly of the control of atomic energy for military purposes.

What was to be the denouement of this political problem-play ? The line of least psychological resistance would, no doubt, be a resort to the old-fashioned expedient of ordeal by battle. Now that four centuries and a half of recurrent warfare in a Western arena had left only two gladiators still erect and aktionsfähig, a third world war might be expected to elicit a knock-out blow that would leave only one Power alive, with no competitor now remaining in the lists to dispute the sole survivor's monopoly of a control of atomic energy that would carry world-dominion with it. This catastrophic denouement was evidently feasible, since a world war fought with atomic weapons would be likely to have at least as conclusive an ending as the first and second world wars, both of which had ended in the decisive defeat of one side, though both these wars had been waged with relatively ineffective pre-atomic armaments. It could therefore be predicted that a third world war between the two remaining Powers would prove to be the final round in a series of contests that, since A.D. 1914, had already reduced the number of the Powers in this arena to two from eight. The outcome of a third world war thus seemed likely to be the imposition of an oecumenical peace of the Roman kind by a victor whose victory would leave him with a monopoly of the control of atomic energy in his grasp.

This denouement was foreshadowed, not only by present facts, but by historical precedents, since, in the histories of other civilizations, a Time of Troubles had been apt to culminate in the delivery of a knock-out blow resulting in the establishment of a universal state; but the precedents also suggested that Mankind could not afford in A.D. 1952
{p.525} to resign itself to sanctioning a reperformance of this familiar tragedy. Whenever, in the histories of other civilizations, a series of cycles of warfare had eventually been brought to a close by the destruction of all the contending Powers except one single survivor, this barbarous remedy for a desperate malady had not availed either to save the sick civilization's life or to rid a war-stricken world of war in perpetuity, because the cost of arriving at a world order by this rough road had been mortally heavy. In the past the forcible establishment of an oecumenical peace had been purchased by a war-stricken society only at the prohibitive price of its inflicting wounds upon itself from which it found itself unable to recover; and, if this had been the ultimate effect of imposing universal peace by violence in a pre-atomic age, what were the Western Civilization's prospects in the event of its falling into a third world war in which a knock-out blow would be delivered with the unprecedented violence that had now been imported into the conduct of War by the invention of atomic weapons ?

If the Western Society took this traditional war-path now that it was equipped with unprecedentedly potent armaments, would it not be condemning itself to purchase an ephemeral peace at a price that would be prohibitive ? Would not the spiritual ravages of War, which had always been much harder to repair than its physical ravages, be likely, this time, to exceed all imaginable measure? Would not the agonies inflicted by atomic warfare make even a once humane and generous-hearted victor turn savage? These were considerations that might well deter the most fanatical Russian mind from allowing itself to believe that a third world war was the necessary price for completing the conversion of Mankind to the Communist Faith, and, a fortiori, deter the most sanguine American mind from allowing itself to believe that, the sooner a third world war was fought and won, the sooner the American people would be rid of the distracting anxieties of international politics and be free once more to devote themselves to the normal pursuits of private life. A sober-minded observer could foresee that after a third war fought with atomic weapons there would no longer be any possibility of life as it had previously been lived either in the United States or in the Soviet Union.

In these perilous circumstances the best hope for the future of Mankind lay in the possibility that the governments and peoples of the United States and the Soviet Union might have the imagination, wisdom, tolerance, self-restraint, patience, and fortitude to seek and ensue the one alternative to a third world war that, at this stage, was practical politics: that is to say, a pacific partition of the Oikoumenê between these two surviving Powers for an indefinite time to come. All the virtues enumerated above would be required on both sides if this policy was to have any chance of success, since it was evident that a society which had tapped atomic energy could never rest easy until it had brought under the control of some single oecumenical authority a newly released titanic physical force which would be a menace to the existence of at least half the Human Race, or, more probably, to the existence of the whole of it, so long as two mutually independent and antagonistic
{p.526} Powers each remained at liberty to use this appalling weapon in waging war against its neighbour. Yet, if this risk of a Third World War fought with atomic weapons was the consideration that made the establishment of some kind of world order imperative, it would be a reductio ad absurdum of Mankind's quest for freedom from, fear if, in seeking the solid and lasting security against a social catastrophe that was to be found in the establishment of a unitary control over atomic energy, the governments and peoples of the two surviving Great Powers were to precipitate the very catastrophe that all Mankind was concerned to avert. If the establishment of a world order was imperative for the sake of avoiding an atomic war, the avoidance of an atomic war must be imperative a fortiori, as an end in itself.

In the circumstances of the time the greatest menace to the welfare and existence of the Human Race was not the invention of atomic weapons, but the rise in living human souls of a temper reminiscent of a mood once prevalent in an Early Modern Western World for about a hundred years beginning with the outbreak of the Western Wars of Religion in the seventh decade of the sixteenth century of the Christian Era. At the opening of the second half of the twentieth century there were Capitalists and Communists who, like their Catholic and Protestant forerunners, felt it to be impracticable as well as intolerable to acquiesce in leaving the allegiance of Society divided, for an indefinite time to come, between an orthodoxy that they identified with their own faith and a heresy that they identified with the ideology of their adversaries. The wrong-headedness of this attitude was betrayed by the conclusion, logically following from it, that Orthodoxy was called upon by duty and self-interest in unison to combat, suppress, and eliminate Heresy by the ruthless employment of every weapon at Orthodoxy's command. The history of the Western Wars of Religion bore witness that spiritual issues could not be settled by force of arms; and the acquisition of atomic weapons gave warning that it would not be open to Capitalists and Communists in a post-Modern Age of Western history to learn the futility of religious warfare, and the necessity for religious toleration, by an empirical method of prolonged trial and chastening error that had been practicable for Catholics and Protestants in an Early Modern Age in which gunpowder was the deadliest weapon at the command of wrong-headed crusaders.

In the nineteen-fifties, as in the fifteen-sixties, the advocate of a patience that could claim to be the highest form of fortitude laid himself open, no doubt, to the charge of being a contemptible procrastinator who could offer no prospect of being able ultimately to avert the 'show-down’ that he was cravenly seeking to postpone; but in the nineteen-fifties, at any rate, this taunt did the Fabian policy an injustice; for it failed to take account of the positive advantage that Mankind stood to gain by a successful pursuit of a policy of playing for time in the particular social circumstances of the Westernizing World of the day. The vehemence of the animosity, at this date, between the respective adherents of Communism and of a traditional Western way of life was one of the psychological effects of the sudden coalescence and shrinkage
{p.527} of the Oikoumenê under the masterful impulsion of an ever faster advancing Western technology. It was an emotional reaction to the malaise that a Western and a Russian Society were both feeling as a result of finding themselves brought abruptly into an immediate physical contact with one another before either society had had time to become spiritually intimate with the other. Either party was having to accommodate itself to the sudden epiphany of a neighbour who had been a stranger to it during the centuries in which its own peculiar culture-pattern had been taking shape. What, on both sides, was now needed above all was time to allow a Subconscious Psyche, whose pace was the tortoise's gait, to adjust itself to the revolutionary situation created by the technological conjuring tricks of a Practical Intellect that had been racing ahead of its subconscious yoke-fellow at the pace of a march hare.¹

This common-sense consideration is clearly brought out in the following passage from the pen of a nineteenth-century Chinese philosopher :

'Now that the ingenious inventions of the steamship and the railway are enabling the European peoples to reach every corner of the Earth and every strange tribe of Mankind, the beginning of a world unity is here. When scattered races and nations are brought together, then divers civilisations will also gradually become unified. Our ancient sages made a distinction between the Tao [the Way of Life] and the Ch’I [the Tools]. The ways of life cannot be immediately unified; they must first be brought together by the tools or implements of human invention. The steamship and the railroad are the carriages of the ways of life. . . .Therefore, these great inventions, which the Western Powers are using for their encroachment upon China, are the very things which the sages of a future age will utilise as the means for the unification of the ways of life of all the nations of the Earth.’ ²

This shrewd Chinese observation brings out the further point that the psychological discomfort, and consequent animosity, that had been caused by Technology's feat of ‘annihilating' physical distance, were not peculiar to the relations between a twentieth-century Western Society and a contemporary Russian Society. The same psychological disturbance had been produced by the same technological revolution in the West's relations with a Chinese Society and with all the other living non-Western civilizations. There had been a simultaneous and similar disturbance in the relations of these living non-Western civilizations with one another in so far as they had been brought abruptly into closer contact with one another through the introduction of Western means of communication; and these divers twentieth-century psychological tensions were so many examples of regular consequences of encounters between contemporaries that, in a previous Part of this Study,³ have also been illustrated from the histories of other arenas.

¹ See pp. 210-11, above.
² Wang T’ao (natus A.D. 1828), quoted by Hu Shih in The Chinese Renaissance: The Haskell Lectures, 1933 (Chicago 1934, University Press), pp. 34-35. The contrast, in point of comparative effectiveness, between the respective careers of Wang T’ao and the contemporary Japanese pioneer of Westernization, Ito, is pointed out by Hu Shih, ibid., pp. 10-12. Cp. Pp. 33-34.
³ In IX. viii, p. 522-629.

{p.528} Our foregoing study of encounters between contemporaries has lit up one truth that, in A.D. 1952, was most pertinent to the consideration of a Westernizing World's prospects. History showed that the psychological disturbance inevitably produced by an encounter was apt to be aggravated to a disastrous degree if either party sought impatiently to cut the Gordian knot by which he found himself unwelcomely tied to an uncongenial fellow-traveller, whereas the same disturbing effect of the same encounter might be turned to account as a supreme opportunity for an act of spiritual creation by evangelists who came to bring, not a sword, but peace, and who found their mission, not in striving to make one of two colliding cultures prevail over the other, but in seeking to make the challenge of an encounter yield the response of a new spiritual vision opening up the vista of a new way of life.

If this was indeed the truth, then the World's first need on the political plane in the sixth decade of the twentieth century of the Christian Era was a détente between the United States and the Soviet Union in the spirit of the détente which, at an equally critical moment of Hellenic history, the Roman and the Arsacid Power had jointly achieved in 23-20 B.C.—to their common credit and to the general benefit of a world whose fate had lain in the hands of those two Powers between them. In 23-20 B.C. the Roman and Arsacid governments virtually agreed to partition between them, uti possidebant, an Hellenic World which had been expanded by previous Macedonian conquests to embrace a Hittite, Syriac, Egyptiac, Babylonic, and Indic Society's domains in addition to the Hellenic Civilization's own patrimony.¹ Augustus was abandoning a Roman aspiration—inspired by a consciousness of Rome's decisive superiority over Parthia in military resources, and entertained since the year 53 B.C. by Crassus, Julius Caesar, and Mark Antony in succession—to reassert by force of Roman arms, as far eastward into the heart of the Continent as Alexander the Great had ever penetrated, an Hellenic ascendancy that, in the course of a century ending in 53 B.C., had been all but extinguished east of the Euphrates. In return for this tacit assurance that Rome was now renouncing an ambition whose achievement would have required the overthrow and destruction of the Parthian Empire, the Arsacid Government was now making it possible for Rome to forget her rankling resentment at the humiliating defeat of an aggressive Roman military adventure by giving back the captured standards and releasing the surviving prisoners of war that had been the trophies of a Parthian victory over an invading Roman army thirty years back.

It is true that the Romano-Parthian détente of 23-20 B.C. did not eliminate all the friction from the relations between the two surviving Powers in a war-stricken Hellenic World. For another four centuries and more, Rome and Ctesiphon were to contend for the prize of paramountcy over a buffer state in Armenia which was to play the part played by Afghanistan in the relations between the British and Russian empires in the nineteenth century of the Christian Era. There were

¹ The outlying Indian province of this expanded Hellenic World was the only fraction of it which, at this date, was not under either Arsacid or Roman rule.

{p.529} also to be other bones of contention between Rome and Parthia besides Armenia, and these divers chronic disputes were to erupt into occasional wars. Nevertheless, the détente of 23-20 B.C. was as auspicious as it was historic; for it set a tone which governed the relations between the Roman Empire and its eastern neighbour on the whole for not much less than six hundred years thereafter;¹ and the tradition of moderation that thus came to prevail in the relations between the western and the eastern Power in a partitioned Hellenic World was not easily overcome by the deliberately banned spirit of militancy.

When Trajan strained Roman resources almost to breaking-point by reverting to the Alexandrine Oriental ambitions of Mark Antony, Caesar, and Crassus, the Augustan policy of self-restraint was promptly readopted by Trajan's immediate successor Hadrian; and, after this Hadrianic liquidation of a Trajanic adventure, a 'temperate and undecisive' border warfare that continued occasionally to interrupt a normal state of peace was not converted into a holy war either by the hold that Zoroastianism gained over the later Arsacid princes of the Parthian line or by their Sasanid successors' act of officially establishing the Zoroastrian Church as the state church of their empire. The friction between the Roman trustees of Hellenism and the Iranian trustees of a temporarily submerged but never extinguished Syriac Civilization did not rankle into a life-and-death struggle until the two Powers fell into the reduplicated Romano-Persian war of A.D. 572-91 and A.D. 603—28; and it was only in the course of the second of the two bouts of this long-drawn-out struggle that a political conflict came to be inflamed into an ordeal by battle between the fanatical adherents of two rival faiths.

In the particular social circumstances of a Westernizing World in the twentieth century of the Christian Era, in which time was needed for the breeding of familiarity, the danger of an atomic world war, which loomed large in A.D. 1952, might be expected to recede if American and Russian statesmanship could contrive to keep the peace even for a much shorter period than the time for which it had been kept between the Roman and Parthian empires in virtue of the détente of 23-20 B.C.; but in this case, as in that, the task of statesmanship would not be easy.² A consideration that seemed likely to tell in favour of a preserva-

¹ From first to last the Euphratean frontier of the Roman Empire endured for nearly seven hundred years, running from Pompey's organization of the province of Syria in 64 B.C. to the irruption of the Primitive Muslim Arab barbarian invaders into the Roman and Sasanian empires simultaneously in and after A.D. 632 (see I. i. 75).
² Professor William McNeill comments: 'I feel that the Rome-Carthage relationship is a far more convincing parallel to contemporary conditions than the Rome-Parthia relationship. In the relations between Rome and Parthia mortal fear and the density of contact were, I believe, absent.’ The present writers comment on this comment is that it was not too much to expect of American and Russian statesmanship in the sixth decade of the twentieth century of the Christian Era that it should stabilize the relation between the United States and the Soviet Union on a Romano-Parthian basis and save it from degenerating into a Romano-Carthaginian 'irrepressible conflict'. Some of the obstacles to the achievement of the statesmen's task in the encounter between the United States and the Soviet Union are examined in the remainder of this chapter. These obstacles were manifestly formidable. Yet the present writer would submit that, when the obstacles had been looked in the face and had been estimated at their highest possible magnitude, it would still be a culpable surrender to despair—or, more culpable still, to mere impatience—if the statesmen were to resign themselves to the conclusion that a third world war could not be averted by a saving combination of the spiritual forces of wisdom, good will, and, above all, forbearance.

{p.530} tion of the peace was the current disparity between the two Powers' respective military resources.

In an age in which the sinews of war were technological and organizational experience and ability commanding man-power and non-human raw materials in quantities sufficient to ensure a full investment of the fund of human skill, the United States possessed in A.D. 1952 a superiority, in potential military strength, not only over the Soviet Union and her satellites, but over the whole World outside the United States' own frontiers;¹ and, though this present American superiority might, as has been noted,² be diminished, or even eventually converted into an inferiority, if the Russians were ever to succeed in fully developing the latent resources of the Soviet Union and in gaining effective control over the developed and latent resources of the rest of the Old World, the United States' present superiority seemed likely to last as far into the future as it was possible to see ahead, since the fund of skill which was the key to industrial power was, in the nature of things, an asset that it would take the Russians much longer to build up than material resources that could be converted into military strength only to the extent to which the skill to exploit them was forthcoming.³

On this showing, the present disparity between the United States and the Soviet Union in potential military strength seemed likely to endure. Yet it would have been rash to jump, on this account, to the conclusion that the Soviet Union would be willing or able in all circumstances to refrain from challenging her rival's decisively superior potential strength; for the competition between Rome and Parthia for paramountcy over Armenia after the détente of 23-20 B.C., and the competition between Athens and the Peloponnesian Confederacy for the accession of Corcyra after the peace settlement of 445 B.C., were warnings that, in any society that was partitioned politically between two Powers, and two only, a Balance of Power, even when this had been deliberately established by overt or tacit agreement, was in constant danger of being upset, even against the parties' will, by their falling into an involuntary yet unavoidable competition for the allegiance of forces, hitherto neutral, whose added -weight might be expected to give the scales a decisive inclination to one side or the other—whichever of the two sides should succeed in securing this accession of strength for itself.

¹ Professor William McNeill comments: 'United States superiority is less than statistics of steel production would suggest, since, in the United States, more effort and material has to be devoted to civilian consumption, and more of military man-power and supply to services, than is required in the Soviet Union, where the lowness of the people's standard of living and the hardihood of their spirit makes them able to live and fight on a much smaller allowance of comforts and amenities than is demanded by Americans.'
² On pp. 488-9, above.
³a 'Les atouts actuels de l'Europe ne paraissent pas reposer sur des nécessités physiques, mais sur un acquis historique qui ne peut lui échapper que par une évolution prolongée et sur les qualités morales et intellectuelles de ses populations. Notre civilisation surindustrialisée ne peut avoir d'autres centres que l'Europe et les États-Unis, tant que les autres régions n'ont pas atteinte méme degré de surindustrialisation, done de technique, de capitalisation, de standard de vie; les courants ne peuvent done être détournés que très insensiblement’ (Dupriez, L. H.: Les Mouvements Économiques Généraux (Louvain 1947, University Press, 2 vols.)> vol. i, p. 380).

{p.531} In a twentieth-century Oikoumenê that, since A.D. 1947, had been virtually partitioned into an American and a Russian sphere of influence, there were at least two pawns on the board that imperilled the maintenance of peace between the two rival Powers through being assets on which neither Power's hold was secure, and consequently being objects for which the two Powers were bound to compete. One of these disputable assets was the industrial war-potential of Europe, which at this date amounted in the aggregate—including the Russian as well as the American sphere of Europe—to more than a quarter of the total industrial war-potential of the World; the other disputable asset was the man-power of the non-Western and non-Russian peasant countries in Asia, Africa, and Indian America (from Mexico to Paraguay inclusive), which amounted in the aggregate to about three-quarters of the living generation of Mankind. In A.D. 1952 each of these two assets was partly in American and partly in Russian hands; if either of them were to fall wholly into the hands of only one of the two competitors for possession, the effect might be to give the Russo-American balance a decisive inclination in the successful competitor's favour; and, in either field, the hold of one of the two competitors was precarious. While the United States had good reason for fearing that the secession of China from the American to the Russian camp in A.D. 1948-9 might be followed by further landslides in the same direction in other Asian or African countries, the Soviet Union had no less good reason for fearing that she might not be able permanently to retain her control over those eastern fringes of the Western Society's Continental European patrimony on which she had imposed her domination during the last phase of the Second World War. Thus either Power was vulnerable, on one of two critical fronts, to the danger of formidable encroachments at its expense on the rival Power's part; and the consequent instability of the current balance made it difficult to hold the political scales even, and proportionately difficult to keep the political temperature low.

A Russian observer, drawing an interim balance sheet in A.D. 1952, and entering in his credit column the accession of China over against an entry in his debit column recording the defection of Jugoslavia, might find it hard to say whether, on balance, the Soviet Union had been a loser or a gainer. If the triumph of Communism in China were indeed an augury of what was to come in the South-East Asian countries, in India, in Pakistan, in Persia, and in an Arab World extending westward from the oil-fields of ' ‛Irāq and Sa'udi Arabia to the Atlantic seaboard of Morocco, this might seem in Russian eyes to be a winning card on a long view; for, in a competition for the allegiance of all Mankind between Communism and a traditional Western way of life, the suffrages of a peasant three-quarters of Mankind might be expected to be the determining factor in the long run; and, in appealing to this vast primitive electorate, Russia enjoyed advantages that America lacked.

The chief of these Russian advantages was that Russia herself, till yesterday, had been one of the primitive peasant countries at the mercy of a Western Society which had outstripped the rest of the World in its technological progress; and that, since yesterday, Russia had
{p.532} discovered a method of catching up with the Westerners by a forced march, and had by this means transformed her own economy at short notice with a success that had been registered in her victory in the Second World War over a Germany who, next to the United States, had been the strongest industrial Power in the Western World of the day. The Russians could thus use their own striking technological achievements under a Marxian dispensation as an impressive argument when they were commending Communism to other peasant peoples who still found themselves in the Russians' pre-Stalinian, or even in their pre-Petrine, plight of individual poverty and collective impotence. Russian propagandists could appeal in the same breath to an ancient Asian peasantry's new aspiration to raise its standard of living, and to a parvenu Asian intelligentsia's aspiration—which was as old and as young as this intelligentsia itself—to make itself mistress in its own house by throwing off the ascendancy of Western intruders who, for their own purposes in Asia, had called this Asian intelligentsia into being.¹

At this point an alert Western counter-propagandist might try to put a spoke in the Russian propagandist's wheel by pointing out to the Asian intelligentsia that in reality the Russians were inviting them to exchange a Western ascendancy for a Russian ascendancy, and not for the national independence that the Russians were dangling before Asian eyes, and by simultaneously pointing out to the peasantry that in reality the Russians were inviting them to exchange the familiar woes of rack-rented tenants, not for the Utopia of peasant proprietorship, but for the prison-house of a mechanized collective farm.² Such home truths, however, were likely to fall on deaf ears. The Asian peasants would not easily be deterred from making the common human blunder of exposing themselves to hitherto unknown evils in their eagerness to escape the known evils from which they were suffering at the moment. As for the Asian intellectuals, they might pay heed to a Western warning against a Russian imperialism if they happened to be natives of Manchuria, Outer Mongolia, or Soviet Central Asia, where this warning would evoke an echo in their memory of their own experience; but the voice of this handful of land-locked intellectuals would not carry far. In the experience of an overwhelming majority of the Asian intelligentsia of the day the typical alien imperialist was not a Russian; he was an Englishman, a Frenchman, a Dutchman, or some other variety of Frank. For the past 450 years the West European conquerors of the Ocean had been taking advantage of the conductivity of their physical medium of aggression to perpetrate indiscreet actes de présence in every corner of the Oikoumenê—'going to and fro in the Earth, and . . . walking up and down it'³ with the assiduity of Satan himself. These ubiquitous Western mariners’ Cossack contemporaries who had made the toilsome trek overland from the Urals to the Sea of Okhotsk had contrived hitherto to commit their aggression less conspicuously. In A.D. 1952 the Russian imperialist, in his missionary warfare with the Western imperialist, enjoyed the advantage of being relatively unknown

¹ See V. v. 154-8.
² See IX. viii. 674-5.
³ Job ii. 2.

{p.533} that had sometimes proved to be a winning card in American presidential elections. At this date the Russian candidate for the spoils of Imperialism was no more than a specious name to most of the peoples to whom Imperialism was now anathema.

By contrast, Eastern Europe was a region where, for the last two hundred years or so, the Russians had been acquiring the self-same bad reputation that, in the world at large, had been pre-empted by the Franks; and in A.D. 1952 a Russian observer, contemplating the entry of Jugoslavia's name on the debit side of his balance sheet, must have been ruefully conscious of Russia's weakness in this quarter. If Slavonic-speaking ex-Orthodox Serb Communists had broken with Slavonic-speaking ex-Orthodox Russian Communists—whose support was of vital importance to Jugoslavia in her dispute with the Western Powers over Trieste—because they could not bear the domineering behaviour of the Soviet Union Communist Party, how could the Soviet Union hope to win any voluntary adherents anywhere in Eastern Europe, or hope permanently to retain her hold on any East European countries if once she found herself reduced to holding them down by sheer physical force? The ominous symptom here, from Russia's point of view, was her unpopularity in East European countries that, as peasant countries, as Orthodox Christian countries, and as Slavonic-speaking countries, ought, on any a priorii ideological theory, to have felt themselves drawn towards the Soviet Union rather than towards the West.

An Orthodox Christian Georgia, for example, had not been reconciled to Russian rule by the freak of chance that had saddled Russia with a Georgian dictator; a Bulgaria that was Slavonic-speaking as well as Orthodox Christian was apparently as recalcitrant to Russian domination in A.D. 1952 as she had shown herself to be on the morrow of her liberation from Ottoman rule by Russian arms in A.D. 1878; Slavonic-speaking Bosniak Muslims and Croat and Slovene Catholic Christians, who were apt to resent their Serb fellow Jugoslavs’ ascendancy, had followed the Serbs' lead with alacrity in the stand that the Serbs had now taken against a Communist Russian imperialism. The Czechs had once looked confidingly to their Russian fellow Slavs to rescue them from the toils of Pan-Germanism; they had cherished this hope all through a century ending in A.D. 1945 with the arrival of a liberating Russian army in a Bohemia that, since the 15th March, 1939, had been a Third German Reich's 'Protectorate'; but the same Czechs had been quickly cured of their sentimental attachment to Russia by the experience of meeting Russians in the flesh in the role of representatives of an officially benevolent occupying Power. As for the Poles, the Magyars, and the Finns, History had demonstrated, long before A.D. 1945, that the Russians had no chance of reconciling them, and a fortiori none of assimilating them. The outcome of the Russian Empire's suzerainty over Finland from A.D. 1809 to A.D. 1918, and of her dominion over 'Congress Poland' from A.D. 1815 to A.D. 1915, indicated that a Slavonic-speaking Catholic Poland and an Ugrian-speaking Lutheran Finland were, both of them, proof against any attempts at Russification. As for the Ugrian-speaking Catholic and Carvinist Magyars, Russia had been
{p.534} their bugbear since A.D. 1849, when her military intervention in support of a Hapsburg Imperial Government at bay had enabled the Emperor Francis Joseph to put down a Magyar national insurrection with which he had been finding himself unable to cope unaided. After the Austro-Hungarian Ausgleich of A.D. 1867 Russia had come to figure in Magyar, as in Czech, imaginations as the champion of Panslavism; and, when invading Russian armies had arrived in Hungary in A.D. 1945 as the champions of Communism instead, this had not, of course, mollified the Magyars' by that time traditional Russophobia.

Nor could the Russians look forward to offsetting their general unpopularity in Eastern Europe by establishing an advanced post for Communism in Eastern Germany; for, in East German as well as West German minds, the Russian régime was bound to be abhorrent on account of its association with the partition of Germany, like Korea, between a Russian and an American hemisphere and with the annexation of Germany's eastern marches to Poland as far west as the Oder-Neisse Line. In the feelings of all Germans under all régimes after the Second World War, the Soviet Zone of Germany and the German territory annexed to Poland might be expected to fuse together into a monumental Germania Irredenta.

Thus, in a world that had been partitioned between the Soviet Union and the United States in A.D. 1947, either Power's hold on important portions of its provisional domain was decidedly precarious; this element of uncertainty made the current Russo-American Balance of Power unstable; this instability was inimical to the statesmen's task of keeping the peace until mutually alien societies, which the progress of Technology had suddenly brought into close quarters with one another, should have had time to become better acquainted; and, though the length of time required for allowing this psychological adjustment to work itself out seemed unlikely to be of the order of magnitude of the six centuries for which the Romano-Iranian frontier had endured after the Augustan détente of 23-20 B.C., it was nevertheless evident that a long period of precarious peace would be needed before there could be any practical possibility of placing this peace on the surer foundation of a genuinely good understanding between the Russian and the Western camp.

In the Western peoples' experience, in their intercourse with one another, the key to collective friendships between nations had been individual friendships between human beings whose personal comprehension of one another and goodwill towards one another had spun a network of human links across the psychological barriers set up by politico-military frontiers. In the light of this Western experience the Soviet Union's Western allies had taken the initiative, before the close of the Second World War, in proposing arrangements on a large scale for the promotion of personal intercourse between her nationals and theirs—especially in the promising form of an interchange of students. In the Westerners' belief it was not their fault that these overtures had not met with any response on the Russian side. They deplored the Soviet Government's evident unwillingness to let its subjects take

{p.535} advantage of these opportunities that were being offered to them of sampling the Western way of life at first hand for themselves; and, while they read in the Soviet Government's opposition to their proposals for intercourse a lack of confidence in the spiritual power of Communism to hold its own against the contemporary Western way of life in the judgement of Soviet citizens, if these were once given a chance of making a comparative personal trial of the two dispensations, this reading of the motives inspiring the Soviet Government's policy of seclusion was no comfort for those Westerners who saw no salvation for the World except in the achievement of a détente between the Western Society and its Russian neighbour. If the Politburo's belief in the hold of Communism upon the hearts and minds of Soviet citizens were ever to become robust enough to outweigh the Soviet Government's fear of allowing their subjects to see the Western World for themselves, then (so it would appear to Western minds) a positive approach would have been made towards the healing of a spiritual schism that was a menace to the prospects, not merely of the Western Civilization, but of Mankind itself, not excluding the garrison of a Communist camp.

In circumstances that were so plainly precarious but in other respects so enigmatically obscure, a dogmatic optimism was as unwarrantable as a dogmatic pessimism, and the living generation of Mankind had no choice but to reconcile itself as best it could to the disturbing knowledge that it was facing issues in which its very existence might be at stake, and that it was at the same time impossible at this stage to guess what the event would be,

In A.D. 1952 these perennial waifs on board Noah's Ark were in the situation in which Thor Heyerdahl and his five fellow vikings on board a balsa-log raft found themselves on the morning of the 7th August, 1947. On that fateful morning a westward-flowing current that had borne the raft Kon-Tiki 4,300 nautical miles across the breadth of the Pacific Ocean was now carrying her towards the Raroia Reef. Beyond the line of surf breaking over this barrier the approaching seafarers could descry the feathery tops of palm trees, and they knew that these palms bedecked idyllic isles set in a still lagoon; but between them and this haven where they would be¹ ran the foaming and thundering reef 'in one line from horizon to horizon',2 and the set of the current and the wind gave the voyagers no chance of circumnavigation. They were heading perforce towards an inevitable ordeal; and, though they might know what were the alternatives awaiting any voyagers in this plight, they could not guess which of these alternatives was to be the ending of their own saga.

If the raft were to be broken up by the breakers, the crew would be torn to pieces by the knife-edged coral if they were not saved by speedy drowning from that more painful death. If the raft were to hold together, and if its crew were to succeed in holding on to it, until the breakers had defeated their own malice by washing the raft up on to the reef

¹ Psalm cvii. 30.
² Heyerdahl, Thor: Kon-Tiki (Chicago 1950, Rand McNally), p. 243.

{p.536} high and dry, a shipwrecked crew might swim across the still lagoon beyond, and so reach one of the palm-crowned isles alive. If the moment of the raft's arrival at the reef should happen to coincide with the flood of one of those high tides that periodically submerged the reef to a depth that compelled the breakers temporarily to subside, the Kon-Tiki might, after all, clear the death-line in calm water, and so come through unscathed. In the event, a high tide did flow in to lift her battered frame off the reef into the lagoon¹ some days after the surf had cast her up on to a bare coral crest; but on the morning of the 7th August, 1947, no man on board the Kon-Tiki could tell which of these alternative destinies was going to be hers and theirs.

The experience of these six young Scandinavian seafarers on that day was an apt allegory of an ordeal that still lay ahead of Mankind at the opening of the second half of the twentieth century of the Christian Era. In A.D. 1952 an Ark of Civilization that had travelled a time-distance of some five or six thousand years across the ocean of History was now making, like the Kon-Tiki, for a reef which its crew would not be able to circumnavigate. This unavoidable danger ahead was the perilous line of transition between a world partitioned into an American and a Russian sphere and a world united under the control of the single political authority which, in an age of atomic weapons, must supersede the present division of authority sooner or later in one way or another. Was the eventual transition to be pacific or catastrophic, and, if catastrophic, how dire was the catastrophe to be? In A.D. 1952 no one in the World could foreknow the outcome of the ordeal towards which the World was then manifestly moving. One thing alone was certain, and this was that the spirit in which an inevitable ordeal would best be met was the spirit shown by Thor Heyerdahl and his companions at the moment when the Kon-Tiki struck the Raroia Reef.

¹ See Heyerdahl, op. cit., pp. 273-4.

(IV) POSSIBLE CONSTITUENT ELEMENTS OF A FUTURE WORLD ORDER

{XII.D.IV, p. 536} Without waiting for a facile wisdom after the event, an observer of world affairs in A.D. 1952 might perhaps usefully speculate on the shape of things to come so long as he confined his consideration of a future world order to elements that an oecumenical dispensation seemed likely to have in common with each of the two demi-mundane dispensations that had been crystallizing round the United States and round the Soviet Union since A.D. 1947.

If the construction of a world order had depended on the Technology in which Man was so accomplished an adept, and not on the Human, Nature that Man found it so difficult to govern and guide, Mankind in A.D. 1952 could have contemplated the future with complacency; for a simultaneous coalescence and shrinkage of the Oikoumenê that had made it more dangerous than ever before to go on waging war had also made it less difficult than ever before to put Mankind in a position to preserve the peace by finding technological solutions for the administrative prob-
{p. 537} lem of bringing the whole of the Oikoumenê under the undivided control of a single oecumenical government.

In terms of facilities for human intercourse no point in the Oikoumenê was so remote from Washington in A.D. 1952 as Georgia and New Hampshire had been when, in A.D. 1792,¹ the Congress of the United States had provided for a four months' delay in the inauguration of a President after the election of his electors, in order to give the successful candidate the time that he would need for winding up his affairs at home and making his way to the seat of the Federal Government on horseback. For purposes of human intercourse the United States at the time of its establishment was of about the same size as the Achaemenian Empire in the fifth century B.C., when it took three months to travel to Susa, the imperial capital, from Ephesus, the Aegean terminus of the Great North-West Imperial Highway;² and the Roman Empire may be reckoned to have been of about the same size in human terms, if we may assume that the centurion who took charge of Saint Paul after the Apostle had appealed to Caesar would not have taken more than three months in conveying his prisoner from the Palestinian port of Caesarea to the Italian port of Puteoli if he had been able to book a direct passage and if he had been less unlucky in his weather.³ In A.D. 1952 three months seemed an inordinate length of time to allow for any journey imaginable. Yet the Roman Empire, the Achaemenian Empire, and the United States in her pre-railroad age were effectively administered commonwealths, though in each of them a period of three months had to be allowed for making the journey from the frontier to the capital; and, in this pre-railroad age, a Darius, Alexander, Demetrius, Caesar, Constantine, and Napoleon were able repeatedly to confound their antagonists by the speed at which they managed to dart from one extremity to another of an Oikoumenê whose radius, in human terms, was a three months' journey for ordinary official travellers, and a proportionately longer time than that for anyone not entitled to travel by the public post.

While in point of conductivity an eighteenth-century United States had been a polity of the same order of magnitude as the Roman or the Achaemenian Empire, in point of constitution it bad been more ambitious. In contrast to the Roman and Achaemenian imperial régimes, which had been content to impose upon their subjects an authoritarian government maintained by a professional army and administered by a professional civil service responsible to an individual autocrat, the Constitution of the United States had provided for democratic government in a polity of the Roman or Achaemenian size by combining the Medieval Western device of parliamentary representation of an electorate with the

¹ In an Act approved on the 1st March, 1792, the Congress of the United States laid down that the members of the Electoral College, provided in the Constitution (Art. II, § 1, par. 2) for electing the President, should themselves be elected on the Tuesday following the first Monday in the November of a presidential election year, and that the term of office of the President elected by the Electoral College should run from 'the fourth day of March next succeeding' the date of election. The initial date of the President's term of office was eventually advanced from the 4th March to the 20th January by the Twentieth Amendment to the Constitution, which was proclaimed on the 6th February, 1933—a date by which the United States had moved out of the Horse Age through the Railroad Age into the Air Age.
² See VI. vii. 82, n. 1.
³ See Acts xxvii. 1-xxviii. 16.

{p.538} Hellenic device of federalism. A representative system in which the people's control over the government was exercised at one remove would, no doubt, have seemed an anaemic dilution of Democracy to citizens of city-states like Florence or Athens, for whom Democracy had signified the direct participation of all the citizens in public affairs; and, for the sake of making a reality of this political ideal, most of these Hellenic and Medieval Western democracies had been content to see the size of their commonwealths limited for ever to the maximum within which a direct participation of the whole citizen body in the government was still practicable. When this was taken as the touchstone for testing the genuineness of Democracy, a country with the area and population of Attica in the fifth century B.C. was the largest that could be governed democratically in the Athenian and Florentine sense; for in Attica the points farthest from the capital—an Eleusis, a Marathon, a Sunium—were none of them farther away from Athens than a single day's journey on foot,¹ while a citizen body that, at a maximum estimate, may have approached a total strength of sixty thousand at its peak,² was unlikely, except on rare occasions, to present itself on the Pnyx in such force as to make the conduct of public business unmanageable.3

¹ On the 10th December, 1911, four students of the British Archaeological School at Athens, one of whom was the writer of this Study, verified this by walking from Sunium to Athens between the dawn and the dusk of a winter's day. Starting from Sunium at 6.30 a.m., our party reached Athens as night was falling. We should have arrived in daylight if, when approaching Vari, we had not wasted an hour or so by swerving off the track and scouring the south-eastern spurs of Hymettus in a vain search for the Cave of Pan. A citizen of fifth-century Athens whose home was at Sunium, Marathon, or Eleusis would, no doubt, have had to spend at least one night in the capital when he made the journey thither on foot in order to transact business there.

² That is, if M. N. Tod, in The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. v (Cambridge 1947, University Press), p. 11, is right in interpreting Thucydides' figures in The History of the Atheno-Peloponnesian War, Book II, chap. 13, to mean that the total number of male Athenian citizens of all classes, of the age of eighteen years and upwards, was something between 55,000 and 61,000 in 431 B.C. Whatever the figure actually was in 431 B.C., it may have been higher before 445 B.C., when some 5,000 men were struck off the register in execution of a law, passed in 451-450 B.C., restricting the Athenian franchise to the children of married couples in which both parents had been Athenian citizens at the time of the child's birth. We do not know the extent to which this reduction of the total by 5,000 in 445 B.C. had been offset by natural increase during the next fourteen years.

³ In composing their nostalgic political Utopias, in which Sparta was their ideal and Athens was their bugbear (see III. iii. 90-97), Plato and Aristotle agreed with one another in setting the optimum number of citizens for the citizen body of a city-state at a figure that was very much lower than the actual numerical strength of the Athenian citizen body in their day, when its strength was considerably smaller than it had been at its peak. In the Republic (423 A.D.) Plato declares that, so long as his ideal city-state has the constitution that he has laid down for it in this dialogue, he does not mind if the number of citizens capable of bearing arms is no higher than a thousand; and he stipulates that, if the number is to be higher than that, it must not be raised to a figure at which the community will lose its unity. In The Laws (737 C-738 A) Plato takes as his criterion for the scale of his ideal city-state the need for the community's man-power to be sufficient to enable it to defend itself successfully if attacked by its neighbours, and on this criterion he opts for a figure of 5,040 citizens capable of bearing arms. Aristotle, in his discussion of the optimum magnitude in The Politics (1225 B-1226 B), refrains from committing himself to any precise figure and merely stipulates that the number of the citizens must not be so large as to make it impossible for them to be all personally acquainted with one another, or impossible for an announcer without a loud-speaker (κήρυζ μὴ Στεντόρειος) to make himself heard by the whole assembly. A popular assembly even of this size would, of course, have been unmanageable if it had been the only organ of government. In a competently managed Hellenic democracy such as the Athenian in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C., the popular assembly was enabled to transact its business effectively thanks to an infusion of the representative system into the Cleisthenean Constitution of 508-507 B.C. Public business was pre-digested and presented, and its subsequent transaction in the popular assembly was controlled, by a grand jury, or general purposes committee, of the citizen body which was, not elected, but picked by lot on a representative system in which the quota allocated to each local administrative district of Attica was proportionate to the fraction of the total citizen body that was estimated to be represented by the citizens resident in that district. Since this committee (the Boulê) was itself five hundred strong and was therefore, like the general assembly, too unwieldly to dispatch executive business in plenary session, it was divided into ten sections which took it in turns to serve as an executive sub-committee for periods of thirty-six or thirty-five days each within the Boulê twelve months’ term of office. This executive subcommittee had a chairman picked by lot, who changed every twenty-four hours. The task of presiding over meetings of the Boulê and the general assembly was entrusted to a presidential body of nine members, picked by lot ad hoc, with a chairman of their own, likewise picked by lot, from the nine sections of the Boulê that were not serving as the executive subcommittee at the moment hours.' (see Aristotle: The Constitution of Athens, chaps. 43-44).

{p.539} The size of the territory of the Roman Commonwealth was perhaps hardly more than a third of the size of the territory of a contemporary Athens at the time when, at some date in the fifth century B.C., the Ager Romanus was divided into twenty districts in order to articulate a national popular assembly into as many companies of voters, each consisting of the citizens whose domicile lay in one of these 'tribal' districts;¹ and the maximum distance that any Roman citizen would have to travel from his home to the capital in order to take part in national public business remained well within Attic limits even after the territory of Rome had been enlarged by the addition of one new district (the Tribus Clustumina) up the left bank of the River Tiber² and four further new districts into which the territory of Veii, across the Tiber, was subsequently carved up after its conquest in 396 B.C.3 When in 358 B.C. two more districts (the Pomptina and the Publilia) were carved out of conquered Volscian territory⁴ in the lowlands south-east of the Alban Hills, Roman citizens now resident there might find it still just possible to

¹ The date of the division of the Ager Romanus into the twenty 'tribal’districts is discussed by K. J. Beloch in his Römische Geschichte bis zum Beginn der Punischen Kriege (Berlin and Leipzig 1926, de Gruyter), pp. 270-1 and 298-303. The only certain chronological facts are that these first twenty tribal' districts must have been instituted before the addition of a twenty-first (the Clustumina), and that the territory of Crustumeniim, out of which this twenty-first district was constituted, must have been annexed to the Ager Romanus before the annexation, in 396 B.C., of the territory of Veii, on the opposite bank of the river, which was subsequently carved up into four more districts (the twenty-second to the twenty-fifth inclusive). It can also be deduced from the lie of the land that the territory of Fidenae, along the left bank of the Tiber between the territory of Urustumerium and Rome, must have been annexed to the Ager Romanus before the annexation of Crustumerium, and Beloch (in op. cit., pp. 298-302) gives reasons for thinking that Fidenae was conquered by Rome in either 428 B.C. or 426 B.C. We do not know, however, whether this conquered Fidenate territory was included in one of the first twenty Roman 'tribal' districts or in the twenty-first district, i.e., the Chasrumina.
Even, however, if the Ager Fidenae was already included in the Ager Romanus at the date at which the original twenty Roman ‘tribal’ districts was instituted, the aggregate area of the Ager Romanus at the time would have been no more than 861.5 square kilometres, as against 8aa if at that time Fidenae was still independent (these figures will be found in Beloch, op, cit., p. 178). On the other hand the area of Attica, within her frontiers as they ran in the fifth century B.C., was as much as 2,440 square kilometers according to Beloch's reckoning in his Die Bevölkerung der Griecfrisch-Römischen Welt (Leipzig 1886, Duncker and Humblot), p. 56, if we include the island of Salamis, which had been colonized by Athenian citizens, but omit the two districts of Oropus and Eleutherae, adjoining the land-frontier between Attica and Boeotia. Thucydides describes the Oropians as 'subjects of Athens' (Book II, chap. 23; cp. Book IV, chap. 09), while it is not certain that the Eleuthereis possessed the full Athenian franchise (the status of the inhabitants of these two districts is discussed by G. de Sanctis in his Atthis (Turin 1912, Bocca), p. 333, n. 1).
² See Beloch, Römische Geschischte, pp. 159, 174, 265, and 270.
³ See ibid., p. 607.
⁴ See ibid., pp. 265 and 356-8.

{p.540} exercise their public rights and duties in the capital by making, within the day, a journey that was rather longer than the journey from Sunium to Athens. This physical feat would certainly have been practicable for Roman citizens domiciled in two other new districts (the Maecia and the Scaptia) that were carved in 332 B.C.¹ out of territory, ceded to in 338 B.C. by the Confederation of Latin City-States, between the two previously acquired outlying districts in the Pomptine Marshes and the metropolitan domain of the Roman Commonwealth containing the original twenty districts. A Roman citizen domiciled in another new district (the Oufentina), carved in 318 B.C. out of territory, ceded to Rome by Privernum,² in the Pomptine Marshes south-east of the two districts established there in 358 B.C., might have been able to reach Rome within the day by an athlete's tour de force; but the task would have defeated the classical Athenian long-distance runner Philippides himself if Philippides had been a Roman citizen domiciled in a district (the Falerna) that had been constituted in 332 B.C.³ out of territory, ceded to Rome by Capua along the north bank of the Lower Volturnus, more than a hundred miles away from Rome as the aeroplane flies;⁴ and, when in the course of the years 268-241 B.C. the territory inhabited by Roman citizens legally invested with the active rights of citizenship was progressively extended from the northern environs of Rome northward across the Appennines to the shores of the Adriatic, and when these fully enfranchised Sabines and Picentes were enrolled in 241 B.C. in a newly created Tribus Quirina and Tribus Velina,⁵ the territory of the Roman Commonwealth flagrantly burst the bounds within which it was physically possible for every citizen to participate in the national government directly.

Thus, long before the time when the Roman Empire became co-extensive with the Hellenic World, and when local communities of transplanted or naturalized Roman citizens were scattered all over the territory of this Roman-built Hellenic universal state, an ever increasing majority of the total Roman citizen body had come to find itself unable in practice to exercise its rights and duties in the forum of Roman national politics simply because its domiciles were too far distant from a capital city that was the only place where, under Rome's city-state constitution, national public business could legitimately be transacted.⁶

¹ See Beloch, Römische Geschichte, pp. 164-5, 388, and 525.
² See ibid., pp. 390 and 526.
³ See ibid., p. 388.
⁴ The writer flew over this stretch of country, from Ostia to the gap between Terracina and Monte Circello, on the 28th October, 1948, after having traversed it by train on the 14th November, 1911.
⁵ See Beloch, op. cit., p. 265; eundem: Der Italische Bund unter Roms Hegemonie (Leipzig 1880, Teubner), pp. 76 and 123-3.
⁶ As late as A.D. 69, when the Pax Augusta was a century old, and when a quarter of a millennium had passed since the date when Rome had made herself virtually mistress of the Hellenic World by overthrowing Macedon, the last other Hellenic Great Power capable of challenging Rome's supremacy, the Roman public was surprised at the discovery that the post of autocrat in constitutional disguise (princes), which had long since become an indispensable organ in the government of the Roman Commonwealth, could be filled by a pronunciamiento on the part of Roman citizens serving in the garrisons of the imperial frontiers ('Finis Neronis . . . varios motus animorum non modo in urbe apud patres aut populum aut urbanum militem, sed omnes legiones ducesque concivetat, evolgato imperii arcano posse principem alibi quam Romae fieri' (Tacitus: Histories, Book I, chap. 4).

{p.541} These outlying Roman citizens had to satisfy their Hellenic craving for direct participation in the government of a city-state by participating in the local government of the praefectura, forum, conciliabulum, colonia Romana, or municipium of which they were also citizens under a Boeotian system of dual citizenship that had been adopted by the Roman Commonwealth as well as by its post-Alexandrine contemporaries the Seleucid Monarchy and the Aetolian and Achaean confederacies;¹ but this municipal franchise was no compensation for the virtual disfranchisement that had been inflicted on them in the forum of Roman national politics, not by any narrow-hearted policy of making the control of the Roman national government a monopoly of a metropolitan minority of the citizen body,² but by the inability of pre-mechanical means of communication to enable the outlying citizens of the Roman Commonwealth to put in an appearance in the capital city when the territory inhabited by Roman citizens had become as extensive as it had actually come to be some two or three centuries before the Emperor Tiberius, upon his accession in A.D. 14, at last took cognizance of the stultification of Rome's city-state constitution by her territorial expansion in the long since overdue act of liquidating the anachronistic Roman national popular assemblies in the capital city.

It was, in fact, technologically impossible for the Roman citizen body in the first century of the Christian Era—and a fortiori in the third century, after the enfranchisement of almost all Rome's alien subjects in A.D. 212 by the Emperor Caracalla (imperabat A.D. 211-17)³—to take, in the government of a Pan-Hellenic Roman Empire, the direct part that the Athenian citizen body in the fifth century B.C. had been able to take in the government of Attica; and this would likewise have been impossible in the eighteenth century of the Christian Era for the citizen body of a United States whose populated territory was then still confined to the eastern seaboard of North America between the Atlantic and the Appalachian Mountains. On the other hand, by A.D. 1952 the progress made by Western technology within the 177 years that had elapsed since the Declaration of Independence had, in terms of human intercourse, reduced to the dimensions of a Periclean Attica a United States that now stretched from coast to coast of the North American island. On the 10th October, 1950, it took the writer of this Study a shorter time, by four hours, to fly from New York to Los Angeles than it had taken him to walk from Sunium to Athens on the 10th December, 1911. By A.D. 1952 it was possible for any politician in Washington, on any day of the year, to present himself, within the day, in person before an audience in any part of the United States; and, though it was not possible for him to be present in the flesh in every city, town, village, and homestead in the country at the self-same moment, it was possible at the self-same moment

¹ See IV. iv. 310-13.
² It was true that Roman citizens organized in local communities with the status of municipia had originally been saddled with the duties of Roman citizenship without enjoying the corresponding rights; but Roman citizens organized in local communities with the status of coloniae Romanae had always enjoyed these rights, besides being bound by those duties, subject to their being physically able to exercise these rights by making the journey to Rome.
³ See V. vi. 7, n. 4; VI. vii. 156, n. 3; VI. vii. 375; and pp. 553-4, below.

{p.542} for every inhabitant of all these homesteads, villages, towns, and cities to enjoy the edifying experience of listening to Cleon by radio and viewing him by television.

Thanks to these recent chefs-d'œuvre of Western Technology, it was in fact possible for all citizens of the United States at any moment to listen in and look in to the public discussion of political issues; and it was also possible for the spokesmen of any ‘lobby' to take a more active part than this in American national politics by flying within the day from Portland, Oregon, or from San Diego, California, to Washington, D.C., and bringing Cleon to bay in his den on Capitol Hill before the demagogue had had time to forestall a Pacific Slope 'pressure group's' offensive by winging his own way to the Pacific Coast and cajoling a Californian or Oregonian audience face to face. It was true that the citizen body could not yet descend on Washington at a day's notice en masse pending the requisite multiplication of seats on aeroplanes and rooms in hotels. Yet, if in this respect the United States in A.D. 1952 might be deemed still to be not quite so close-knit, in terms of human intercourse, as Attica had been in 449 B.C., the United States was already closer-knit than Attica had ever been on the new plane of intercourse that the inventions of broadcasting and television had opened up. In Hellenic history there had never been a time when the entire population even of a Lilliputian Belbina, not to speak of a Brobdingnagian Attica, had been able to listen to the voice, and watch the countenance and gestures, of a politician talking to an assembly in the agora at the capital. On this plane the United States hi A.D. 1952 was as diminutive in size, expressed in terms of human intercourse, as Abraham Lincoln's Springfield or as Demosthenes' Paeania; and the United States' size today gave the measure of the World's size tomorrow, since, if any one thing could be predicted with assurance in the apprehensive World of this date, it was that a rapidly growing fleet of aeroplanes, flying at a rapidly accelerating speed, would become capable of reaching their destinations in a rapidly diminishing number of minutes, and that a rapidly growing host of radio and television sets would become capable of picking up sights and sounds at a rapidly increasing distance from the points where these importunate instruments were located.

It will be seen that in A.D. 1952 world government was already within Mankind's grasp in so far as Technology could avail to thrust this now urgent political necessity into human hands. As soon, however, as we ascend—or descend—from the plane of Technology to the plane of Human Nature, we find the earthly paradise skilfully assembled by the ingenuity of Homo Faber being reduced to a fool's paradise by the perversity of Homo Politicus.

In A.D. 1952 a democratic world government that had now become technologically feasible was not within sight of becoming practical politics, because the ripe fruits of Technology could not be harvested without a change of heart of which, so far, there was little sign. In a coalescing and shrinking Oikoumenê whose human inhabitants were finding themselves at ever closer quarters with one another, an urgently needed, but not yet inaugurated, world order was still awaiting the

{p.543} fulfilment of a prophecy made in the Syriac World in the eighth century B.C. by the Judaean seer Isaiah:

'The wolf . . . shall dwell with the lamb and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them. And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. And the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice' den. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all My holy mountain; for the Earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.' ¹

This Hebrew prophecy had not been left altogether unfulfilled by the Earth's non-human fauna; for it was a scientifically verified fact that the beasts of prey did have a habit of granting a' truce to fellow creatures that were normally their quarry when a drought drove them all to the same still welling spring, or a forest fire to the same still unscorched glade, or a flood to the same still unsubmerged holy mountain; and these habitual signs of grace in the dumb animals' response to the challenge of emergencies threatening the lives of all creatures alike were the foil against which a Syriac prophet or a Western naturalist would contemplate the twentieth-century spectacle of human carnivores that still could not or would not bring themselves to enter into a Truce of God, even when they were being forced to rub shoulders with one another by the menacing rise of a tide of atomic science round the coasts of a shrinking Oikoumenê.

In A.D. 1952 the nearest approach to political co-operation that a Russian bear and an American eagle found themselves able to make to one another was their common participation in the activities of the United Nations Organization. The inability of the two surviving Great Powers to come closer together than this had been the limiting factor that had prevented the architects of the constitution of the U.N.O. from making of it anything more intimate than a forum for international debate between delegates of the governments of sovereign independent states, of which three, besides the two titans, were armed with a veto on resolutions passed by a majority of their fellow states-members. During the five years of its existence up to date, the U.N.O. had demonstrated its value, notwithstanding the severity of these limitations, by proving to be a decidedly more conductive means of political communication than 'the usual diplomatic channels'. Delegates of the United States Government and the Soviet Government could still continue to talk to one another here when the traditional channels of communication had become choked; and at Lake Success they were parleying in the presence, and with the participation, of delegates of governments of states of lesser calibre which, in this forum, had a constitutional right to make their own voices heard.

These were no mean services to the cause of peace and concord; and an oecumenical institution that provided these services was one with which Mankind could not afford to dispense in their perilous situation at the time. Yet these merits did not make the U.N.O. capable of be-

¹ Isa, xi. 6-9.

{p.544} coming the embryo of a world government. The realities of the distribution of power in the World that had emerged from the Second World War were not adequately reflected in the clumsiness of a constitution that had embodied the unrealistic principle of 'one state one vote', and that had then found no better means of bringing a fictitious 'equality of states' into line with a harsh reality than the concession to five Powers of a veto that was denied to their nominal peers. The best prospect in sight for the U.N.O. was a possibility that it might evolve from being a forum into becoming a confederacy; but there was a great gulf fixed between any confederacy of sovereign independent parochial governments and any federation of peoples with a central government claiming and receiving the direct personal allegiance of each individual citizen of the union; and it was notorious that the history of political institutions knew of no case in which this gulf had been crossed by any other process than a revolutionary leap.

On this showing, the U.N.O. seemed unlikely to be the institutional nucleus out of which an eventually inevitable world government would develop, though it seemed likely to remain an indispensable instrument for the preservation of peace unless and until a unitary world government had grown out of some other germ. In A.D. 1952 the probability seemed to be that, if and when an effective world government did come into being, it would take shape through a development, not of the U.N.O., but of one or other of two older and tougher political 'going concerns' which, as a result of the outcome of a Second World War, had already partitioned the Oikoumenê between them. The world government of the future seemed likely to stem either from the Government of the United States, which in A.D. 1952 was already in effect the government of more than one-half of the Oikoumenê, or from the Government of the Soviet Union, which at the same date was already in effect the government of the rest of the Habitable and Traversable World. If the living generation of Mankind had been free to choose

utrorum ad regna cadendum
omnibus humanis esset terrâque marique,¹

there could be little doubt in a contemporary Western observer's mind that a decisive majority of all living men and women that were competent to make any judgement at all upon this issue, and an overwhelming majority of such people in all Western countries, would have opted for becoming subjects of the United States, and not subjects of the Soviet Union, so long as these two Powers continued to divide between them the dominion over the Oikoumenê; and there could be equally little doubt that the same millions would also have prayed for the victory of the United States in the event of a war between the two Powers for the prize of world-wide supremacy that the elimination of one competitor would leave exclusively in the surviving competitor's hands. In Western eyes, at least, it seemed self-evident that, if Mankind were indeed to be confronted with a choice between destroying itself or acquiescing in the enforcement of peace by the fiat of some single Power, and if they were

¹ Lucretius: De Rerum Naturâ Book III, 11. 836-7, quoted on p. 484, above.

{p.545} then to be confronted with a choice between the United States and the Soviet Union as the only possible two candidates for this necessary yet invidious political mission, the United States would be preferable, out of all comparison, to the Soviet Union as the victor in this fateful competition for being the Power whose fiat the rest of Mankind was henceforth to obey.

The virtues that made the United States incomparably preferable to the Soviet Union as a candidate for this imperial role stood out conspicuously against a Communist Russian foil.

America's cardinal virtue in the sight of her present and prospective subjects was her transparently sincere reluctance to be drawn into playing this role at all. An appreciable portion of the living generation of American citizens, as well as all the ancestors of all American citizens who were not themselves immigrants, had been moved to pluck up their roots in the Old World and to start life again on the farther side of the Atlantic by a yearning, not to meddle in, but to extricate themselves from, the affairs of a Continent whose dust either they or their forebears had once demonstratively shaken from off their feet;¹ and the buoyancy of the hope with which the forebears had made their deliberate withdrawal from the Old World in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries was matched by the poignancy of the regret with which the living generation of Americans was making its compulsory twentieth-century return. The compulsion, as we have seen,² was taking the form of an 'annihilation of distance' through the progress of a Western technology; and the Americans themselves had done perhaps more than any other Western people to develop this peculiarly Western art in the direction in which its course was now running directly counter to its American adepts' cherished political aims and ideals. The flaming sword wielded by this inexorable angel of their own creation who was expelling the Americans from their Utopian earthly paradise had been flaring in the skies since the invention of the aeroplane at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Yet nothing less cogent than the experience of finding themselves involved willy nilly in two world wars in one lifetime could have moved the American people between A.D. 1941 and A.D. 1947—as the Japanese people had been moved between A.D. 1853 and A.D. 1868 by the logic of comparably portentous events—to recognize that they could no longer safeguard their interests, independence, or even existence unless they broke with a traditional policy of isolation which still retained a hold on their hearts even when it was ceasing to convince their intellects. Shrinking, as they did, from involvement in international politics, the Americans shrank still more vehemently from being cast, as they were being cast by their inescapable preponderance in power, for the role of serving as their neighbours' leaders and masters; and their manifestly genuine regrets for a lost idyllic seclusion were their best credentials for commending them to foreign peoples over whom the force of circumstances was constraining them to assume authority.

’The truth is, and must be, that social life is happiest and most har-

¹ Matt, x, 14; Mark vi. 11; Luke ix. 5 and x.11; Acts xiii. 51 and xviii. 6.
² On pp. 479-86, above.

{p.546} monious where those who have to rule are the last people who would choose to be rulers, and is least happy and least harmonious where the rulers are of the opposite disposition.’¹

On the morrow of the Second World War, Plato's dictum was as exculpatory for the Americans as it was damning for the Russians.²

The Americans' second outstanding virtue was their generosity. It has been noticed in a previous chapter,³ as one of the auspicious features in the situation after the Second World War, that the Soviet Union, as well as the United States, was a 'sated' Power; but the economic and social situations of the two countries were identical only in the general sense that Russia, like America, was a country commanding vast still undeveloped human and non-human resources. In contrast to America, Russia had hardly yet begun to exploit her potentialities, and the developments that she had carried out at such cost in human effort and suffering during the twelve years immediately preceding the German assault upon her in A.D. 1941 had been largely sabotaged by her abominable Western invaders. Thereafter, the Russians had taken an unjust advantage of finding themselves on the winning side by recouping themselves for the Germans’ destruction of Russian industrial plant by seizing and removing plant, not only from a guilty Germany, but from East and Central European countries that the Russians professed to be liberating from the Nazis, and from Chinese provinces in Manchuria that they professed to be liberating from the Japanese. This was a contrast indeed to the United States' post-war reconstruction policy of first making, on a vote passed in the House of Representatives at Washington on the 25th January, 1944, a major contribution to the resources placed at the disposal of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, and then following up this short-term emergency measure for the relief of the war-stricken peoples of the World by launching, on the 5th June, 1947, a long-term plan for reconstruction in Europe that was to be payable entirely out of the American tax-payer's pocket.

The Marshall Plan was perhaps not quite unprecedented. There was a classical precedent in a post-Alexandrine chapter of Hellenic history that had seen the states of the Hellenic World of the day vie with one another in the generosity of their gifts to the city-state of Rhodes after Rhodes had been smitten by an earthquake in 227 B.C.⁴ This, however, had been a case of many countries contributing towards the relief of one country, whereas the Marshall Plan was a case of one country offering help to all the rest, and making this offer at a time when the donor was

¹ Plato: Respublica, 520 D, quoted in III. iii. 252.
² Damning, that is to say, for the Russians in the role of rulers, in which the Russians had always been at their worst. There had, however, been another role in which the Russians had always been at their best since the days of Boris and Gleb (passorum A.D. 1015), and that was the role of martyrs. The noble army of Russian martyrs, whose ranks had been perpetually recruited by one generation after another of intrepid volunteers from the eleventh century to the twentieth, bore witness to the historical fact that Russian history, looking forward in A.D. 1952, would be slow to believe that this other vein in the Russian ethos had run dry.
³ On p. 478, above
⁴See Polybius: Oecumenical History, Book V, chaps. 88-90, cited on p. 271, above.

{p.547} already the strongest single Power in the World of the day. In the past it had been customary for dominant Powers, not to give, but to take,¹ and there had been no departure from this evil custom in the policy that the Soviet Union had been following. In setting a new moral standard for 'power polities' by launching the Marshall Plan, American statesman-ship was putting Russian post-war actions to shame and Russian post-war intentions to an 'acid test',² and on both these counts Russian statesmanship made a poor showing in its response to this searching American challenge. In declining Marshall Aid for the peoples of the Soviet Union, the Soviet Government might be held to be acting within its rights, and foreign critics, at any rate, had no locus standi for objecting to a decision against which no effective protest had been made by the misera plebs Sovietica at whose expense their government's decision had been taken; but, in using her hold over her satellites in order to compel them too to reject the American offer, the Soviet Union was guilty of an abuse of power that was particularly flagrant in cases in which countries at her mercy whom she was forbidding to accept American assistance happened to be countries that were doubly in need of it because they had been stripped by the Soviet Government, since the end of the Second World War, of industrial plant which the war itself had spared.

It will be seen that Russia's behaviour would have made a present to America of the beau role even if America's behaviour had not been as handsome as in fact it was; and this contrast between the post-war records of the two surviving Great Powers comes out even more sharply when we pass from the economic plane to the political and the military. A post-war world that was craving for freedom from want had a still greater yearning for freedom from fear; and, while the fear inspired by the Soviet Union was as intense as it was ubiquitous, fathers of families in countries under the hegemony of the United States were not being kept awake at night by any fear that a United States Government that had them in its power might abuse this power by coercing them with the threat of taking their children's lives with atomic weapons which, in 'the Free World', were an American monopoly.

Citizens of West European countries were, however, now haunted by fears that some American decision, in which the West European peoples

¹ Imperial Powers which, like the Roman Empire in the Hellenic World and the British Rāj in India, had plumed themselves on their disinterestedness, had been apt to claim credit, not for having subsidized their subjects out of their own pockets, but for having (as Clive saw it) shown an astonishing moderation in leaving even a shred of wool on the backs of defenceless sheep whom the imperialists had been at liberty to sheer. It was true that, in the British dominions in India, Lord Cornwallis had restrained a British rapacity, and stamped out a British corruption, that had been running riot for a generation, and that in the Roman Empire Caesar and Augustus had put an end to the still more disgraceful orgies of Roman business men after these had run riot for longer than a century and a half; but such testimonials are not easy to distinguish from indictments. 'What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? God forbid’ (Rom. vi. 1-2).
² In A.D. 1947 the reigning government in Russia was a fair target for a telling phrase which in A.D. 1918 had been levelled primarily at the government then reigning in Germany by a President of the United States speaking on Russia's behalf. ‘The treatment accorded to Russia by her sister nations in the months to come will be the acid test of their good will’ (Point VI of President Wilson's Fourteen Points announced in his address at a joint session of the two houses of the Congress at Washington on the 8th January, 1918).

{p.548} might have had no say, might inadvertently bring Russian atomic missiles hurtling down on Dutch, Danish, French, and British heads. Such West European fears of dire consequences descending upon Western Europe as unintended by-products of some impulsive American retort to some provocative Russian act of aggression were anxieties that might or might not be well founded, but their currency in Western Europe was a fact, and this psychological fact exposed a constitutional flaw in the structure of a commonwealth of Western nations in which all the partners, with the crucial exception of one partner whose 'fiat' was law', were exposed to the risk of being involved in a perhaps irretrievable catastrophe as a consequence of decisions in which they might have had no voice, on issues in which, for them, the stakes were life and death. It was proverbial that in a society articulated into a number of sovereign independent parochial states every people was apt to get the government that it deserved;¹ and even this political nemesis was not easy for human souls to bear, notwithstanding the undeniable justice of it. In a commonwealth of nations indissolubly associated under the hegemony of a paramount Power, the lot of all the subordinate participants was the intolerable injustice of getting a government that had been deserved, not by them, but by their predominant partner; and this was the plight of America's, as well as Russia's, satellites in A.D. 1952.

It was, moreover, a plight that could not be mitigated appreciably by resorting either to 'the usual diplomatic channels’ or to the new forum provided by the United Nations Organization. Under the current unwritten constitution of a nascent Western Community, issues of vital or lethal moment to its West European, Canadian, and Australian citizens were being decided by the play of party politics in the domestic political arena of the United States. The non-American citizens of the Western Community had no institutional means of taking part in the working out of Western policy at this domestic American formative stage; and the most that their municipal governments could do on their behalf was to take the ineffective gesture of tabling motions pleading that a stable door should be locked after an apocalyptic steed had flown.²

By A.D. 1952 a celebrated American definition, dating from A.D. 1895, of the standing of the United States in the Western Hemisphere had come to be no less true of her standing in a world-wide Oikoumenê in which all countries were under the United States' hegemony save those that were under the Soviet Union's domination.

'To-day the United States is practically sovereign' ['in the United States' portion of a partitioned world', as an observer, quoting Olney's despatch in

¹ 'Toute nation a le gouvernement qu'elle mérite’ (de Maistre, J.: Lettres et Opuscules Inédits (Paris 1851, Vaton), vol. i, p. 215, 15th August, 1811).
² By the end of the year A.D. 1950 these painful truths had been borne in upon the minds of the West European citizens of the Western Community by their experience of an international crisis over a local war in Korea that had been threatening to rankle into a war of world-wide dimensions. The contemporary reaction of a West European nationalist was expressed in caricature in the aphorism 'America was thus clearly top nation, and History came to a.' (Sellar, W. C., and Yeatman, R. J.: 1066 and All That (London 1930, Methuen), p. 115). The reaction of a West European federalist, addressing himself to an American public, might be expressed in the slogan: 'No annihilation without representation.'

{p.549} A.D. 1952, would be inclined to amend the text in substitution for the original words 'on this continent'], 'and its fiat is law upon the subjects to which it confines its interposition. Why? It is not because of the pure friendship or good will felt for it. It is not simply by reason of its high character as a civilised state, nor because wisdom and justice and equity are the invariable characteristics of the dealings of the United States. It is because, in addition to all other grounds, its infinite resources, combined with its isolated position, render it master of the situation and practically invulnerable as against any or all other Powers.'¹

This dictum on the standing of the United States had not lost any of its cogency in coming to be applicable to a far wider sphere of hegemony than had been in the mind of the Secretary of State at Washington who had written those sentences in A.D. 1895 and, though a patriotic non-American citizen of a twentieth-century Western commonwealth of nations might be content to make the pertinent comment that the most lacerating American whips were, at any rate, less grievous instruments of political chastisement than even the least venomous Russian scorpions, 'a philosopher’ might 'be permitted to enlarge his views' ² by taking some meteorological observations. In the first place he would observe that the virtual monopoly, by a paramount Power, of the determination and execution of policies in which the lives and fortunes of satellite peoples were at stake was pregnant with a constitutional problem that could not be evaded; second, that, in the partitioned Oikoumenê of A.D. 1952, this problem was a live one both in the American and in the Russian sphere of hegemony or domination; third, that the problem would still present itself, and still demand a solution, if the two spheres were eventually to be amalgamated; and, fourth, that this problem could not be solved without recourse to some form of federal union.

The mere recital of these observations made it clear that the constitutional issues raised by the advent of a supra-national order on the political plane were unlikely to be settled easily or rapidly. One promising feature in the situation was that the United States and the Soviet Union—one or both of whom would have a decisive say in the constitutional development of a commonwealth of nations under its hegemony—were, as it happened, both of them morally committed to an approval of federalism in principle in virtue of having written it into their own constitutions.

The Constitution of the United States was the product of a deliberate choice of full federal union in preference to a looser form of political association—between states only, and not also between human beings—that had quickly been proved inadequate by painful experience; and the people of the thirteen original states-members of the Union had federated with one another on terms that had left a door open for the admission of new-comers. In the minds of latter-day citizens of a United States that had increased its membership from the original figure of thirteen states to an eventual figure of forty-eight between A.D. 1792 and A.D, 1912, a

¹ Secretary of State Richard Olney, in a dispatch of the 20th July, 1895, to the United States Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s.
² Gibbon, Edward: The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 'General Observations on the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West', at the end of chap, xxxviii.

{p.550} familiarity with the history of their country during those 120 years had associated the idea of federalism with the idea of progressively incorporating additional constituents; and against the historical background of this domestic American precedent a suggestion that the American people themselves might one day enter into a federation with other peoples would not be startling even to Americans who found it unpalatable. A federation between the peoples of the United States and other English-speaking countries would, indeed, be very closely in line with domestic American constitutional tradition. A proposal to extend a federation of English-speaking Western peoples to Continental West European peoples that were akin to the English-speaking peoples in their way of life without being linked with them by a community of language might, on the other hand, look, in American eyes, like a hitherto untried venture for which no adequate precedent was to be found in the domestic American experience of incorporating into the citizen body of the United States a small French-speaking population in Louisiana in A.D. 1803 and small Spanish-speaking populations in California and New Mexico in A.D. 1848. Yet the United States' next-door neighbour Canada was a successfully working model of a federation between two peoples, speaking different languages and professing different religions, who were approximately equal to one another in numbers; and another cue was offered by the letter of the law officially in force in the Soviet Union.

In Western eyes the federal constitution with which the Soviet Union had equipped itself might look suspiciously like a facade put up to mask the retention or re-establishment of a centralized despotism that had the momentum of six hundred years of Russian history behind it. The Petrine Russian Empire from which the Soviet Union had inherited its immense patrimony had been the heir of a Muscovite principality that, from the fourteenth century of the Christian Era onwards, had added field to field by extinguishing the independence of one after another of its neighbours. Was not the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics merely a disingenuous new title for a unitary autocracy of which no concealment had been made by Stalin's franker predecessors Peter the Great and Ivan the Terrible? As far as any Western observer could judge, this current Western critique of the constitution of the Soviet Union was fair comment on the whole. Yet there was one point in which the Bolsheviki’s professed constitutional new departure appeared to have some substance, and this was a point in which Stalin's hand was credibly reported to have been at work. Thanks to his own Georgian origin, Stalin seems to have appreciated the strength of the nationalist opposition aroused among the non-Russian subjects of the former Russian Empire by a policy of Russification; and he seems to have drawn the conclusion that, if this policy were not repudiated and reversed by the Tsardom's Communist successors, the effect would be to alienate the non-Great-Russian citizens of the Soviet Union from a Communism which they would then write off as a new disguise for a familiar Russian imperialism.

Accordingly, when the constitution of the Soviet Union was being worked out during the years A.D. 1918-24,¹ the internal administrative

¹ The constitution in force in A.D. 1952 was that of the 6th December, 1936.

{p.551} map of the former Russian Empire was entirely recast—and this apparently on Stalin's initiative—on lines that brought it into correspondence with the linguistic map; and the non-Great-Russian nationalities of the Union—including even the smallest and the most backward peoples in the Caucasus, the Urals, and Central Asia—were thus granted at least the boon of having their local administration and education conducted in their own mother tongues, however illusory their official autonomy might be in other respects. This Stalinian administrative map of the Soviet Union, drawn on a linguistic basis, was no Magna Carta. For example, the erection of an Autonomous Republic of Bashkiristan within the framework of a Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic in A.D. 1920 did nothing to abate the centralization at Moscow of the control of police, communications, economic affairs, and, indeed, all the effective levers of power; and, more than that, it did nothing in this case—under a local government on which the Bashkirs themselves were not represented—to check the continuation under the Soviet régime of the unedifying process of chicanery, expedited by brute force, through which, under the Tsardom, the Bashkirs' lands had been, passing into Great Russian hands.¹ No doubt the Bashkirs, like the Five Civilized Indian Nations in the South-Eastern United States, were marked out for being made the victims of spoliation by the fact of their happening to lie in the fairway of a mighty tide of aggressive colonization; but the Bashkirs were not the only non-Russian people to suffer adversity under the Soviet régime. Thereafter, in the Great Purge of A.D, 1936, the non-Great-Russian personnel in the governments of some of the non-Great-Russian units on Stalin's administrative map was reported to have been liquidated,² and in the Russo-German War of A.D. 1941-5 both the Crimean Tatar Republic and the Kalmuck Republic on the Steppe between the Lower Don and the Lower Volga seem to have foundered on the charge that their peoples had been guilty of disloyalty to the Soviet cause.

It will be seen that Stalin's administrative map of the Soviet Union was not to be taken at its face value; but a moral commitment cannot be wiped out through being dishonoured by its makers; and, in the world that had emerged from the Second World War, Stalin's map might live to be translated, after all, from the limbo of camouflage into the realm of reality if, on either side of the dividing line between a Russian and an American demi-monde, the letter of the Soviet Union's federal constitution were one day to be applied in the spirit of the Pan American Union of Republics and the British Commonwealth of Nations.

On the constitutional plane neither of these two political associations between a number of fully self-governing parochial states was a stage on any road leading towards world government, since the basis of both associations was the scrupulousness of the associated states' reciprocal respect for one another's independence. The members of the Pan American Union were not moving towards a federation between these

¹ See Pipes, R. E,: 'The First Experiment in Soviet National Policy: The Bashkir Republic, 1917-1920', in The Russian Review, October 1950 (New York), pp. 303-19.
² See Toynbee, A. J., and Boulter, V. M.: Survey of International Affairs, 1937, vol. i (London 1938, Milford), pp. 13-20.

{p.552} successor-states of four different West European Powers' colonial empires,¹ and the members of the British Commonwealth had been positively moving away from the former political unity of an old-fashioned British Empire governed from Westminster. The British Commonwealth was, in fact, an entente between mutually independent states that had disengaged themselves from a unitary empire, while the Pan American Union was an entente between mutually independent states that had never been united politically in the past and were not moving towards unity now. Yet, just because the weaker parties to the association were aware—as they were in either case—that the strongest member of the partnership had no intention of misusing his superior strength in order to impose his will upon the rest, both the Pan American Union and the British Commonwealth had achieved a felicitous relation of psychological parity between states of widely different calibre whose peoples not only spoke different languages but were also divided from one another by the more formidable barrier of a diversity in their ways of life. In this favourable psychological climate it had proved possible for Great Britain and Ceylon, the Indian Union and New Zealand, the United States and Guatemala, Brazil and Hayti, freely to co-operate with one another as moral equals; and the spirit animating these ententes might be enlisted in the cause of federation.

Though the practical possibility of federation, either with the United States or with the Soviet Union, was limited by the notorious fact that, hitherto, so intimate a form of political association had proved practicable only between communities closely akin to one another in their ways of life, the cultural and social circumstances of the time gave scope, within these limits, for federal union on a considerable scale. Federation with the Soviet Union did not, it is true, seem likely, in the dubious judgement of a Western observer, to prove an attractive proposition either to the Soviet Union's Orthodox Christian satellites to the south of her or to her Western Christian satellites to the west of her; but a federal union between the United States, the other English-speaking peoples, and the Continental West European peoples would already have been within sight above the horizon of practical politics if an affinity in culture and a community of interests had been the sole, or even the decisive, considerations. The obstacle—and it was a formidable one—was a human political animal's proneness to give prejudice the precedence over common sense and to allow itself to be swayed by feelings instead of taking rational decisions on the merits of a constitutional case. An American people which had once had to fight in order to win its independence would be reluctant to pool its sovereignty in a federal partnership with other peoples, even if the candidates for partnership were peoples of like passions with itself² and also even if the principal partner were assured that her own representation in the prospective federal government would be proportionate, not merely to the relative numerical strength of her population, but to an index figure registering

¹ The United States was a successor-state of the British Empire, Brazil of the Portuguese, and Hayti of the French. All the other seventeen members of the Pan American Union were successor-states of the Spanish Empire.
² Acts xiv. 15.

{p.553} the United States’ overwhelming preponderance over the rest of the world in economic productivity. On the other side, West European satellites of the United States might be reluctant, for their part , to sacrifice a shadow of sovereignty that they still retained in a dependent relation which actually left them at the United States’ mercy; and, for the sakes of clinging to this shadow , they might refrain from making any attempt to win the substance of an equitable share in the joint conduct of common affairs which could be obtained only at the price of pooling in a federal union with the United States, a sovereignty which, in this form, could be revalidated within limits corresponding to current political and economic realities.

The mulish perversity of Human Nature that thus threatened to assert itself on both sides, if and when a proposal for a federation was brought forward, was an obstacle that could not be expected to yield easily of quickly to common sense and goodwill; yet there were historical precedents which indicated that, in any commonwealth of nations that had originated in the establishment of one dominant Power’s paramountcy over a cluster of satellites, the passage of time would likely bring with it a gradual approach towards political equality through the progressive enfranchisement of the imperial people’s former subjects of subordinates.¹

In the history of a Roman Commonwealth whose arcanum imperii had been its liberality in conferring the Roman citizenship upon aliens who had fallen under Rome’s rule or hegemony, successive narrow-hearted reactions against this characteristic manifestation of a Roman political genius had all, in turn, been successively transcended sooner of later. Between 338 B.C. and 241 B.C., the inhabitiants of about one quarter of Cisappennine italy, extending along the south-west coast as far down as Cumae, and along the north-east coast as far as far up as Pesaro, had been progressively incorporated into the Roman citizen body, and this politic generosity had enabled Rome to establish her dominion over the whole peninsula. The door that had thus been held open for a century had then been closed and had ben kept bolted and barred thereafter for the next 150 years; but in 90-89 B.C., the rest of Rome's Italian satellites had extorted the Roman franchise from the paramount power by force of arms; and, when, after this tardy further step forward, the reactionaries had brought the process of enfranchisement to a halt again, this time along the line of the River po, the door had been broken open by Caesar and had never been closed again. Caesae's enfranchisement of Rome's Transpadine satellites in 49 B.C., restarted a process which this time n Caracalla's enfranchisement of virtually all the residue of Rome's then still unenfranchised subjects throughout an empire that embraced all but a fragment of the Hellenic World; and the readiness of the Roman citizen body at this stage to share its political privileges with the rest of the the inhabitiants opf the Hellenic Oikoumenê that had been united politically under Rome's aegis seems to hve been matched by the readiness on the paret even of ancient and famous non-Roman hellenic communitites now

¹ See, for example, VI. vii. 146-58.

{p.554} to accept Roman citizenship at the cost of, at long last, merging in an oecumenical body politic a parochial identity which they had been jealously preserving through the ages. In earlier chapters of Hellenic history there had been at least two critical occasions—the first in 431 B.C. and the second in 228 B.C.¹—on which Athens and Sparta had remorselessly sacrificed the Hellenic Society's prospects of attaining an urgently needed political unity to their own parochial corporate egotism. There is no record of the reemergence of this spirit in either Spartan or Athenian hearts on the historic occasion at the turn of the second and third centuries of the Christian Era.²

In the history of the Caliphate a corresponding evolution was accomplished more swiftly. Little more than a hundred years elapsed between the political reunification of the Syriac World by the arms of Primitive Muslim Arab conquistadores in the fourth and fifth decades of the seventh century of the Christian Era and the Gleichschaltung of the Arab Muslim 'ascendancy' with their non-Arab ex-Christian and ex-Zoroastrian converts and clients as a result of the Khurāsānī Iranian Muslim marchmen's victorious insurrection against the Umayyad régime in A.D. 750.³

These precedents from Syriac and Hellenic history were good auguries for the prospect that, in a post-Modern chapter of Western history, a supra-national commonwealth originally based on the hegemony of a paramount Power over its satellites might eventually be put on the sounder basis of a constitutional partnership in which all the people of all the partner states would have their fair share in the conduct of common affairs. A constitutional development on these lines seemed as probable in the long run as it was desirable, but in A.D. 1952 this was not the first business on Mankind's political agenda. The rock immediately ahead was a sooner or later inevitable transition from a present political partition of the Oikoumenê between two rival Powers to a

¹ See III. iii. 340-1 and IV. iv. 265.
² Professor William McNeill comments: 'Was Roman citizenship still a privilege by the time of Caracalla? Or was it a burden? Some historians think that the franchise was extended to all free men for the purpose of making them liable to the citizens' taxes on inheritances, etc., [in addition to the subjects' taxes, to which they were liable already]. In any case the willingness of the existing citizen body to see new-comers allected to its ranks will hardly have counted. The act of enfranchisement was surely an administrative act of a bureaucracy which was by then more or less immune from public opinion—at least in most matters.'
The present writer's reply would be, in general, that bureaucratic or autocratic governments, as well as elected representative governments, are amenable to public feeling and opinion—though their reaction to it may sometimes be slower, and though they may perhaps be able to go rather farther in the dangerous game of flouting it without being called to order. In regard to the case in question, his reply, in particular, would be that this enfranchisement of virtually the whole of the still remaining non-citizen element in the population of the Roman Empire was followed by the growth of a corporate sense of imperial patriotism which eventually expressed itself in the coining of the new word 'Romania' to denote a now undivided and homogeneous Roman imperial people's oecumenical fatherland. This sequel to the Act of A.D. 212 suggests that this Act was well timed in the sense of having been enacted at a date at which the public feeling of the divers elements in the population of the Empire was ripe for it; and if it had not been 'practical polities' in this sense in A.D. 212 it would not, so the writer would guess, have been possible to enact it in that year merely because of its fiscal attractiveness in the professional eyes of an imperial bureaucracy. The writer would also guess that even as recently as the reign of Hadrian (imperabat A.D. 117-38) it would not yet have been 'practical politics' to enact the provisions of the Canstitutio Antoniniana of A.D. 212, however attractive the measure might have been to the bureaucracy already at this earlier date.
³ See II. ii. 141 and VI. vii. 147-52.

{p.555} future political unification of the Oikoumenê under the control of some unitary political authority; and the first concern of the living generation of Mankind was that this perilous transit should be accomplished without a third world war.

In an age of atomic warfare there were no peoples for whom this was not a matter of life and death in a world whose unification was already an accomplished fact on the military plane, but there were three peoples that had also incurred a special measure of moral responsibility for seeing to it that an urgently needed world order should be established without another catastrophe. In bringing about, between them, the defeat of Germany in the World War of A.D. 1939-45, the peoples of Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States had taken it upon themselves on behalf of Mankind to reject Hitler's offer of a lasting peace at Hitler's price. If in A.D. 1940-1 Hitler had been allowed by these three Powers to have his way, peace would have been imposed on the World by the establishment of a Pax Germanica that would have relieved Mankind from the fear of another world war for as far ahead into the future as any human eye could see. Hitler's price for this boon had been so exorbitant that the three victor Powers' decision to reject his offer was likely to win for them the blessings of Posterity supposing that they were now to succeed, between them, in bestowing the same boon on Mankind at an appreciably lower cost in the coin of standardization, regimentation, injustice, and tyranny. On the other hand, these same victors over Hitler would bring down upon their own heads Posterity's curses if they were to allow a third world war to rankle out of their victory. In denying to Mankind the opportunity of enjoying the substantial benefits of an odious Pax Germanica, the peoples of the United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain had taken upon themselves a binding moral obligation to provide Mankind with a better world order than Hitler's without inflicting on Mankind the third world war that a German victory would have spared them.

Should the ex-victors now fail to accomplish this self-imposed task, they must expect to share with the Germans the execrations of an intolerably tormented Mankind so long as any memory survived of Mankind's history in the twentieth century of the Christian Era. On the other hand, if, between them, they were to succeed in piloting Noah's Ark intact into the still waters of the lagoon beyond the perilous reef, they could look forward to being remembered throughout the rest of the Human Race's term of life on Earth as the heroes who, by an unprecedented moral triumph over the perversity of their own human nature, had closed a chapter of human history branded with the ghastly mark of Cain¹ as the abominable Age of Civilization, Human Sacrifice, Slavery, and War, and had opened the way for Mankind to acquit itself better than before in its perennial struggle with an innate Original Sin. A generation which, in A.D. 1952, was thus bound over to render a strict account of a morally onerous stewardship might take heart from the words of an Athenian philosopher who had witnessed the breakdown of the Hellenic Civilization.

¹ Gen. iv. 15, 17, and 22.

{p.556} 'In the struggle that will decide whether good or evil is to prevail in us, the issue is immeasurably greater than at first sight it might seem to be. . . . We must do everything that lies in our power to attain to Virtue and Wisdom in This Life. The prize is so splendid and the hope is so great.' ¹

¹ Plato: Respublica, 608 B, and Phaedo, 114 C, quoted in V. vi. 168.

(V) PROBABLE FUNCTIONS OF A FUTURE WORLD ORDER

{XII.D.V, p. 556} Supposing that a world government were to be established, what would its functions be? Presumably these functions would be much the same whether the establishment of this prospective world government were to be achieved pacifically or at the cost of a third world war, and whether it were to remain fixed in its initial form of a domination or hegemony exercised by a paramount Power or were eventually to acquire a federal constitution in which all the people in a supra-national commonwealth might hope to receive something like their fair share in the conduct of common affairs. Evidently the choice between these divers alternative roads might make a world of difference to the possibility of a world government's being able to perform its functions satisfactorily, whatever these functions might be; but the functions themselves would presumably have been determined in advance by the play of those historical forces that, in A.D. 1952, seemed to be making the establishment of some kind of world government, at some price, inevitable. Was the nature of these future functions then perhaps already discernible ?

A world government would be the government of a universal state; and the specific characteristics of universal states, as well as the generic characteristics of states of all the divers historic species, were revealed in the history of Man in Process of Civilization within the last five or six thousand years.

A state was an institution in which part of the psychic power-charge of an individual human being was impounded and combined with parts of the power-charges of other men and women to constitute a pool of power at the disposal of persons controlling and operating a government. A state might be defined as a piece of social mechanism designed for the twin purposes of accumulating power and of applying it; and the preservation of the power of a state was consequently bound to be the first concern of the persons, whoever these might be, who had one of these political pools of power at their command. The most dangerous threat to the survival of any parochial state had always been the existence of other parochial states within striking distance of it, and therefore the most urgent business of any parochial sovereign government had been to maintain its own power against encroachments on the part of other parochial governments in the same politico-military arena and, if possible, also to increase its own power at the expense of each and all of its neighbours. At the same time, every parochial government had always had to fight for the preservation of its power on a domestic front as well as on a foreign front, since, even when it was not being threatened by

{p.557} the aggressiveness of some foreign Power, a government would still have to reckon with the perennial recalcitrance of its own subjects; and, while it might be true that even in the smallest and weakest state the most powerful private individual would be impotent to resist the government's will so long as he was trying to resist it in isolation from his fellows, it was an obvious move for a number of individuals to take a leaf out of the state's own book by making common cause among themselves in order to pit against the pooled power of the state the pooled power of a family, clan, fief, faction, class, or interest.

In view of this possibility of a concerted private challenge to a state's corporate power, the concern felt by every government for the preservation of its power would force any government to set limits to its subjects' freedom of private enterprise. A government could not afford to allow any individual subject, and a fortiori not any organized group of subjects, to enjoy an unregulated licence to accumulate and apply power on their own private account, even in private relations with one another in which the state's interests were not involved directly and were perhaps not involved ostensibly at all. In order to safeguard its authority against threats to it on the domestic front, every government found it necessary to impose laws on its subjects and to see to it that these laws were effectively enforced. States had learnt, for example, that they could not afford to let their subjects take the law into their own hands, or even to let them keep it in their own hands in spheres in which the application and execution of the law had traditionally been, not a public, but a private, affair regulated by non-state institutions like the Blood Feud and the Wergeld. Equity demanded, of course, that a law drafted, promulgated, and enforced in the name of a state by the persons controlling and operating that state's government should not discriminate either to the advantage or to the detriment of any particular member or group of members of the political community, and should not be devised to serve the selfish interests of the ruling group of members constituting the government. In practice, even those states that had achieved the highest standards of justice so far known in the history of Civilization had never been able to preserve their legislation from being affected to some extent by the current domestic balance of power. It would, indeed, probably have been possible for a competent student of human affairs, possessed of full information about the content and application of the laws of any state at any date, to reconstruct, by inference, the domestic balance of power prevailing in that state at that time.

Thus, during the first five or six thousand years of the currency of this institution, a struggle—in which the government of every state that had ever existed had been constantly engaged—for the preservation and increase of a state's power had led, in the lives of parochial states, to a concentration of governmental activity on two functions: the function of competing with foreign Powers by waging war with them for objects unattainable by diplomacy and the function of regulating the private relations between the state's own subjects by legislation in which the current domestic balance of power was invariably reflected to some extent. The existence of states had thus been bound up with the

{p.558} perpetuation of two social evils, namely warfare between states and conflict between classes; and the wickedness that had thus proved to be inseparable from an institution which had been found to be indispensable by Man in Process of Civilization had been pilloried in the Christian doctrine that the incubus imposed by the existence of states upon the lives of human beings during their terrestrial pilgrimage was a consequence of, and self-inflicted punishment for, Mankind's Original Sin. This Christian proposition had, no doubt, latterly become a hard saying for politically sanguine-minded ci-devant Christian citizens of Modern Western states adorned with parliamentary representative institutions; yet in A.D. 1952 this doctrine still accurately represented the genuine attitude (as distinct from any officially prescribed theory) of all that vast majority of Mankind in Russia, Asia, Africa, and Indian America that was still subject, at this date, to the rule of authoritarian régimes.

These two activities—War and Police—through which a state asserted its power abroad and at home respectively, were characteristic, not only of parochial states, but of states of every species, including those universal states that, in the instances on record up to date, had come into existence, in the course of the disintegration of broken-down civilizations, through the eventual liquidation of litters of parochial states which had failed to keep their warfare with one another within non-lethal limits. Although, however, the revolutionary substitution of a single universal state for a multitude of parochial states had not ever put either of the two traditional functions of a government altogether out of court, it had been apt to make both the war-function and the police-function less imperative. Functions whose ultimate purpose was the state's own self-preservation would be less imperative for a universal state than for its parochial predecessors because, ex hypothesi, a universal state would have no adversaries of its own calibre to face within the bounds of its own world, and because the same antecedent Time of Troubles that had eliminated all states in this particular society save the single survivor could also be trusted to have broken the spirit of private individuals, factions, classes, and interests.

In a domestic field that had come to be coextensive with the entire domain of a disintegrating society, the oecumenical government of a universal state that had come into existence in the traditional catastrophic way had been apt to find the familiar task of asserting its own authority less pressing than the novel task of saving a disintegrating society from going into a final dissolution in which the universal state now embodying this society would be bound to perish with it.1 In the pursuit of this more far-sighted concept of its own self-interest an oecumenical government might, no doubt, be prone still to see the salvation of Society in a policy of conserving the vested interests of a dominant minority and repressing the unrest of a dissatisfied proletariat. Yet, even if the oecumenical rulers' conception of the interests and welfare of Society might still appear to be prejudiced, one-sided, and inequitable in the eyes of a philosopher, the salvation of Society was, at least in principle and intention, an altruistic objective for the government of any state to

¹ See VI. vii. 57-61.

{p.559} pursue; and the addition of this altruistic aim to a government's avowed agenda, over and above the original self-regarding aim of striving to maintain the state's own power, was therefore a landmark in political history.¹

This positive concern of Mankind's rulers for Mankind's welfare had been born into the World at the births of universal states, and till recently it had always displayed the image and superscription,² and shared the fortunes, of one or other of those representatives of this type of polity that had risen and fallen up to date. The concern for welfare shown by oecumenical governments could not be more enlightened than these governments themselves were, and it could not survive their wrecks. In the dark night of Mankind's political life in the Age of the Civilizations, this flicker of light had accordingly come and gone with the universal states in which it had been momentarily kindled; yet the visionary gleam, intermittent though it had been, had never completely vanished from the Oikoumenê since the inauguration of a Sumeric Empire of the Four Quarters and an Egyptiac Middle Empire³ at the close of the third millennium B.C. ; and in the recent history of a post-Modern Western World the still awaited advent of a world government had been anticipated by a revival of the ideal of government for welfare in parochial states that were also still engaged in a familiar fratricidal struggle for existence. This post-Modern Western World at the time of writing presented the spectacle of a neck-and-neck race, at a speed that was already break-neck and that was still rapidly accelerating, between two ultimately incompatible conceptions of what the objective of a state ought to be. The Western parochial states of the day were war-and-peace states and welfare-states simultaneously; and, though these Janus-faced parochial polities might perhaps be written off the political map

¹ This historic recognition that it was part of the duty of a government to concern itself with social welfare was undoubtedly a landmark in the political history of Man in Process of Civilization; but it is not so certain that it was an altogether new departure; for it might have been difficult to find, among the multitude of states known to History, any that had been concerned with the maintenance of its own power to the entire exclusion of all concern for the welfare of its subjects. It seems improbable that either force or habit or even the strongest combination of the two could avail for very long to keep a state in being if its subjects were once convinced that the sole object of their rulers was to misuse the state's coercive powers in order to promote the interests of a dominant minority at the expense of the rest of the community. When governments had indulged in activities that were patently anti-social, they had usually found it politic to refrain from carrying these activities to lengths at which they would constitute a serious tax upon their subjects' prosperity and happiness. For example, we have observed (in IV. iv. 144-50) that, in an eighteenth-century Western Society in which War was avowedly 'the sport of kings', the royal sportsmen took care to set discreet limits to the social costs of their anti-social pastime. The peoples could not be persuaded to sacrifice themselves for the sake of winning wars until they had been persuaded that the wars which they were being asked to fight were the peoples' own serious business in which the public welfare was at stake. On this showing, it seemed likely that some measure of concern for its subjects' welfare as well as some measure of concern for its own power must always have entered into the policy of any state that had ever succeeded in making itself a going concern. The most tyrannical government could perhaps never afford altogether to disregard its subjects’ interests; and, conversely, the most benevolent government could perhaps never afford altogether to disregard its own self-preservation.
² Matt. xxii. 20; Mark xii. 16; Luke xx. 24.
³ In IV. iv. 412-13 we have already noticed that under the political dispensation of the Middle Empire the Pharaonic autocracy was regarded as having its reason d'étre in its services to Society, whereas the political dispensation of the Old Kingdom had found the raison d'étre of Society in its services to the Pharaonic autocracy.

{p.560} of the future as being patently peritura regna, this struggle within their bosoms between two competing and ultimately incompatible ideals was a new event of abiding interest because the struggle would be bequeathed by them to the world government, whatever this might be, that was to become the doomed parochial states' residuary legatee.

In the obscurity that at this time still veiled Mankind's political future, it could at any rate be foreseen that, if and when something in the nature of a world government did take shape, the task of maintaining its own power would cost it less effort and less anxiety than this had cost any universal state known to History. A single authority holding a worldwide monopoly of the control of atomic energy employable for military purposes would not be confronted by any rival of its own calibre, and it would also not have anything to fear from any residual pockets of recalcitrant barbarians in fastnesses encircled by a global polity that would already have embraced the rest of Mankind. A world government of the future would therefore be free to concentrate its efforts on the promotion of human welfare with a singleness of purpose that had not been feasible for any universal state in the history of any other society.

When a future world government eventually went into action in pursuit of this objective, what would be likely to be its first move? The pursuit of human welfare by political means would raise, as we shall see, for any political authority embarking on it the problem of striking a balance between the competing claims of individual freedom and social justice; but it might be prophesied that this would not be the first concern of a world government in the initial stage of its political operations. The best-intentioned world government would not have its hands free to work either for Justice or for Liberty or for a practical compromise between these two goals of human endeavour unless and until it had succeeded in making adequate provision for Police, in the broadest construction of the term, in a world in which all tools had now become edged tools and in which every act—deliberate or impulsive, wise or foolish—was now charged, no longer just with the innocuously feeble force of human muscles, but with the titanically high-powered 'drive' of machinery 'possessed by atomic energy.

E. TECHNOLOGY, CLASS-CONFLICT AND EMPLOYMENT

(1) THE ORIGIN AND NATURE OF THE PROBLEM

{XII.E.I, p. 561}



(2) Mechanization and Private Enterprise
(3) Alternative Approaches and Social Harmony
(4) Possible Costs of Social Justice
(5) Living happy ever after?