214 LAW AND FREEDOM IN HISTORY

Christendom, but in the contemporary academies of all the other living
civilizations. By A.D. 1932, on the other hand—and that was the year in
which the passage quoted above was, in fact, published—the facilities
at the disposal of a scientific-minded student of History had been im-
proved and enlarged, out of all recognition, by three achievements that
the Western Civilization had accomplished in the course of its interven-
ing Modern Age.

In the first place the explosive aggressiveness of the Western peoples
in this age had—for the first time in recorded history—rounded up the
whole of Mankind, over a literally world-wide range, into a single oecu-
menical society; and, while in the first chapter of this gradually unfold-
ing story the unification had been carried out within a frankly Western
framework and on the superficial planes of Economics and Politics, it
was evident by A.D. 1932 that the leaven was then working its way down
to the cultural and spiritual depths of life and that, on these deeper
levels, the receptivity of the living non-Western societies to the radiation
of Western techniques, institutions, and ideas was preparing the way for
a cultural counter-offensive.1 A culturally servile non-Western intel-
ligentsia, that had originally been called into being, like Frankenstein's
monster, to further its callous manufacturer's step-fatherly purposes,*
had begun, by the twentieth century, to beget a happier and more fruit-
ful freedmen-class of 'occidentalists' who were making it their mission
to serve the need of the hour in the lives of their own societies by inter-
preting the intrusive Western culture in their own cultural terms and
thereby giving the great non-Western majority of Mankind the means of
exercising some discrimination in a retaliatory spoiling of the Egyptians,
The 'occidentalists' were already beginning to appropriate, for the
common use and benefit of Humanity at large, the cultural wealth that
had been amassed by an acquisitive-minded West; and in the meanwhile
this internationalized stock of honey had been notably increased by the
labours of busy Western bees.

If the Modern Western historians had been the sole representatives of
Modern Western intellectual enterprise, a robbery of the Western hive
in A.D. 1932 would have proved disappointingly unrewarding for the
'occidentalists'; for, in those imaginary circumstances, the occidentalists'
plunder in A.D. 1932 would still have been as exiguous as it would have
been four hundred years earlier. As we have already noticed, the Late
Modern and post-Modem Western historians had done nothing to in-
crease the number of the data of a significantly high order of magnitude
that the Modern Western student of the history of Man in Process of
Civilization had inherited from his Medieval predecessors* Though the
latter-day Western historians had been no less restlessly industrious
than the contemporary Western apprentices in other intellectual
trades, they had been spending their energies on grinding the already
known significant data into details, to the exclusion of any attempt
to make significant additions to knowledge by discovering new data
on an illuminatingly large scale. While, however, the Western
historians had thus been leaving undone those things which they ought

i See IX, viii. 464-80. a See V. v. 154-9.