416 PROSPECTS OF THE WESTERN CIVILIZATION
the two contemporary empires in its death agony did not impinge upon
the survivor, as a post-Sumeric Volkerwanderung had impinged upon
the Egyptiac World. When the Han Empire went to pieces at the turn of
the second and third centuries of the Christian Era, the inhabitants of the
Roman Empire remained unaware that an earth-shaking event was
occurring at the opposite extremity of the Old World; and conversely,
when, some two hundred years later, the Roman Empire in its turn went
to pieces at a time when, in the Far East, a new society was beginning to
emerge from the Han Empire's ruins, this nascent Far Eastern Civiliza-
tion was not thrown back into chaos by the Roman Empire's fall. In the
days of the Han Empire and the Roman Empire, human destinies had
not yet been gathered into one basket, and so, though some eggs were
constantly being broken, there were always others left intact.
The freedom which an Hellenic and a Sinic 'universal state' each still
enjoyed to work out its own destiny 'without interference from the other
appears the more remarkable when we recollect that neither of these
'oecumenical' empires was confined "within the bounds of the single
civilization that had brought it to birth. Each of them also embraced
portions of the domains of other societies1 and was consequently re-
garded by its inhabitants as being coextensive with Mankind itself. In
a Westernizing World of a j>. 1950 which had not yet been united politi-
cally in a universal state, any such illusion would have been impossible
for the members either of the supra-national community gravitating
round the United States or of the community of the same order of mag-
nitude gravitating round the Soviet Union; for, however tenuous might
be the commercial contacts between these two groups of countries by
comparison with the web of either group's internal trade, the competi-
tion between them in military technology and in political propaganda
was so intense that the members of either were acutely aware all the time
of the other community's existence and activity. The unification of the
whole habitable and traversable surface of the planet, thanks to Western
enterprise, had by this time gone so far on this plane of politico-military
rivalry that there was reason to fear that, in this highly charged and at
the same time highly conductive atmosphere, there might prove not to
be room, even within the wide limits of a spaciously all-inclusive
Oikoumen£, for both a sovereign independent Soviet Union and a
sovereign independent United States, in spite of the auspicious fact that
—in contrast to a Germany and a Japan who, between them, had deto-
nated the Second World War—either of these giants was, on the econo-
mic plane, a 'satiated* power still possessing within its own boundaries
immense reserves of undeveloped non-human resources and corre-
spondingly immense opportunities of finding innocently productive
employment for a growing population for as long a time as could be seen
ahead. In aj>. 1950 the United States and the Soviet Union were enjoy-
ing freedom from want, but not freedom from fear.
If the charge with which an ever more high-powered Western tech-
nique and organization had thus loaded the now perilously conductive
atmosphere of a not yet politically unified twentieth-century Western-
i See VI. viL 63.