GIBBON ON FALL OF ROME IN THE WEST 747
pointed out in the works of two of Gibbon's own contemporaries, Hume1
and Turgot,2 Gibbon himself has not drawn the obvious moral for the
prospects of his own civilization from the tragic historical fact that the
once beneficent diversity-in-unity of a Classical Hellenic body social—
whose parochial sovereign states had brought themselves to 'confederate
for their common defence* in the crisis of 480-479 b.c.—eventually fell
so desperately out of joint that a long-tormented Hellenic society came,
at last, to acquiesce in the hardly less desperate remedy of replacing a
dislocated constellation of parochial Powers by one single universal
state. In the light of this tragic episode of Hellenic history, it would be
no paradox to suggest that the foundation of the Roman Empire was a
more * awful revolution' than its fall. Yet, familiar though Gibbon was
with the plot of this pre-Augustan Hellenic tragedy, he seems never to
have inferred from it the possibility that the diversity-in-unity of an
eighteenth-century Western body social might be exposed to the same
danger of going awry.3
Another disagreeable contingency that Gibbon overlooks in this pas-
sage is the possibility that the effect of social conductivity may be equi-
vocal. He perceives that the Western ^0(jy Qoc{^ of j^g dav fs conductive
in virtue of the unity underlying the diversity in its constitution, but he
tacitly makes the assumption that the political qualities which one mem-
ber of a Western family of states will acquire from another can only be
those that happen to be desirable in his estimation. The same assump-
tion was still being made, a hundred years and more after Gibbon's
time, by British, American, French, and Belgian practitioners of a par-
liamentary representative form of constitutional government which its
votaries labelled 'Democracy'.4 At the turn of the nineteenth and twen-
tieth centuries it was being taken for granted in 'democratic' Western
countries that 'Democracy* was destined to supplant all other forms of
government, not only in still 'undemocratic' Western countries, but in
the World at large. But after the lapse of yet another half-century this
optimistic assumption had come to seem naive to Western observers who
had seen the tide of 'Democracy', in the Western meaning of the word,
begin to ebb on the morrow of a First World War which had been fought
and won in order 'to make the World safe for Democracy', in the words
of President Wilson's accurate description of the Western Allied and
Associated Powers' principal war-aim.3 Since a.d. 1919 *the general
manners of the times' had been furthering the propagation, from one
state to another, of the principles and practice, not of parliamentary
democracy, but of Communist and Fascist totalitarianism; and in the
1 In his essay Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences, quoted in IL i. 473-4.
Hume had been anticipated by Sprat, T.: The History of the Royal Society (London
1667, Martyn), pp. 23-23.
a In his Second Discours sur les Progres Sticcessifs de I'Esprit Humain, delivered on the
nth December, 1750, which has been cited ibid,
3 This inference -was obvious to a Western observer taking his bearings some 170
years after Gibbon's time, when a constitutional weakness in the structure of a Modern
Western body social, to which Gibbon's genius had been blind, had become too flagrant
to escape the notice of even the dullest understanding. There is, of course, no need to be
a genius in order to be wise after the event.	4 See I. i. a.
s President Woodrow Wilson in his address to the Congress of the United States on
the and April, 1917.