THE  WORLD TO-DAY	435
peacefully established as in Poland and Czecko-Slovakia, or
violently created as in Greece and Spain. These two last-
named countries are still in the throes of either occasional
eruptions as in Greece, or interminable civil war as in Spain.
The latter country, invaded by General Franco from Mo-
rocco in 1936, has been the battle ground, ever since, of a
virtual struggle for ascendancy between the forces of Soci-
alism and Fascism, on account of the patently surreptitious
support given to the two contending parties by their sym-
pathisers all over Europe. It is only a question of time as
to when this localised conflict will burst through the camou-
flage into a universal conflagration. The race for armaments
among the Powers is an ominous petrel of the coming storm.
Meanwhile the atmosphere is surcharged with the psycho-
logy of ' war and rumours of war/
The vast and rapid changes that were taking place in the
East since about the middle of the last century were also
now bearing fruit. China after the Boxer Revolt (1900),
Japan after the Russo-Japanese War (1905), and India after .
the Partition of Bengal (1905), were all different from what
they had been for centuries past. They were undergoing
rapid transformation along Western and Nationalistic lines;
and each in its own way was not merely breaking with its
own past, but also becoming impatient of Western domina-
tion. It is not surprising that the emulation of the West
has increasingly bred a dislike of European interference ; the
former is itself the cause of the latter. " There is no more
amazing or portentous phenomenon in modern history," says
Will Durant, " than the way in which sleeping Japan, rough-
ly awakened by the cannon of the West, leaped to the lesson,
bettered the instruction, accepted science, industry and war,
defeated all her competitors either in battle or in trade, and
became, within two generations, the most aggressive nation