LAWS OF NATURE IN CIVILIZATIONS 257
conspicuously in a comparison of the four-years' span of the General War
of a.d. 1914-18 with the corrected figures of approximately 21 years for
the General War of a.d. 1792-1815 and approximately 26 years for the
General War of a.d. 1672-1713.'
At the same time a synoptic view of the later and the earlier general
wars in this Western series also shows that, in the act of becoming
shorter, Western general wars had been becoming more concentrated,
more intense, and more relentless, and that, so far from the progressive
shortening of the lengths of bouts of general warfare signifying an
alleviation of the scourge of War, the progressive concentration of general
warfare within an ever smaller number of years at an ever higher degree
of intensity had resulted in the recurrent general wars working greater
havoc in the life of the Western Civilization than they had worked when
they had been carried on more desultorily over longer Time-spans.
While it was true that under this older dispensation the plague of War
had been more or less endemic in the Western body social, it was also
true that a relatively mild perennial malady was in many ways more
tolerable and less dangerous than a series of occasional sudden violent
epidemics breaking in upon spells of relatively good health. This abrupt
alternation of Total War with Total Peace was, indeed, manifestly more
trying to the constitution of Society than an earlier condition in which
the difference between spells of health and bouts of sickness had been
less sharply accentuated. In the Early Modern Age of Western history
the war-ridden society had been affected like a victim of chronic malaria,
whose vitality is permanently lowered by his complaint without his life
being brought into jeopardy. In the Late Modern Age the Western
Society had been relieved of its malaria thanks to a gratifying improve-
ment in the day-to-day performance of Western political preventive
medicine, but the patient had been made to pay for this rise in his normal
level of health by becoming subject to thunderbolt 'strokes* which were
as unpredictably sudden as they were lethally violent.
While the deadliness of War had thus been increasing by geometrical
progression with each further repetition of a Western war-and-peace
cycle in which the bouts of War had been becoming shorter, and the
spells of Peace longer, every time, the respective stances of the com-
peting Powers had been as uniform, throughout the series of recurrent
cycles, as the sequence of events in which, cycle by cycle, the resolution
of political and military forces had recurrently worked itself out.
We have already noticed* that the Western international tableau of
1	The average figure for the length of time by which each successive Western general
war was becoming shorter than its immediate predecessor thus works out at eleven years
as between the latest three general wars in this series according to the corrected calcula-
tions of their spans. When the writer was doing this sum on the morning of the znd
August, 1950, he had at his elbow his original notes, written in a.d. 1929; and, consider-
ing that at that date the possibility of constructing an atom bomb -was still beyond the
mental horizon of a layman like himself, he was startled to read in his own handwriting,
jotted down twenty-one years ago: 'Since the General War of a.d. 1914-1918 lasted
little more than four years, we find, on following out the progression, that the next
general war, which might be expected to break put about a.d. 2035, would be instan-
taneous in duration, i.e. annihilating in effect. This mathematical fantasy is borne out by
all the empirical evidence available for a forecast in this year a,d. 1939.
2	On p. 244, above.
B 2915X8:	K