LAWS OF NATURE IN PRIVATE AFFAIRS 223

once pointed out to a self-righteous Alexander the Great, if we are to
give credence to a celebrated anecdote.1 Meanwhile, in the field of private
affairs, the recognition that individual acts of will had only to occur in
sufficiently large numbers in order to become amenable to commercially
lucrative statistical calculations was a discovery that had not had to wait
for a latter-day Western insurance business to bring it to light. The eco-
nomic demand that had been profitably catered for by the Egyptiac pot-
ter, the Nomad conductor of caravans, and the Syriac innkeeper, long
before any Western manufacturing concern, omnibus, railway, or air-
ways company, or hotel or restaurant proprietor had put in an appear-
ance, was, of course, for the purpose of our present inquiry, a statistical
quantum of the same quality as the insurance risk of burglary, inasmuch
as it was a collectively regular, and therefore predictable, statistical pat-
tern emerging from an aggregate of individually wayward, and therefore
unpredictable, acts of personal will.

(b) 'LAWS OF NATURE' IN THE ECONOMIC AFFAIRS OF AN

INDUSTRIAL WESTERN SOCIETY

The statistical patterns discernible in the fluctuations of demand and
supply in the dealings between caterers and their customers were woven,
in the social woof and weft of an Industrial Western Society, into a wider
network of economic regularities, uniformities, and recurrences revealing
themselves statistically in the aggregate effects of numerous personal acts
which, individually, were too wayward to be predictable. At the time of
writing, halfway through the twentieth century of the Christian Era, the
state of knowledge and the range of activities in this particular field were
illuminating for the study of the questions whether the affairs of Man
in Process of Civilization were or were not governed by any 'laws of
Nature', and, if they were, then to what extent and degree. By this date
the man in the street in an Occidental Babylon had already long since
:ome to take for granted the reality of 'booms' and 'slumps' whose
dternations had made or marred his private fortunes perhaps more than
>nce in his own personal experience; but the pattern of these popularly
•ecognized 'business cycles' had not yet been worked out in statistical
erms with sufficient clarity or precision to have emboldened the in-

1 *If justice is eliminated, what are states but gangs of robbers writ large (qtdd sunt
egna nisi magna latrocinia)? For, after all, what are gangs of robbers but states writ
mall ?... The captured pirate's retort to Alexander the Great was as neat as it was true.
Vhen the king asked the man what he meant by infesting the sea, he gave the frank and
•uculent answer: "What do you mean, pray, by infesting the globe ? The only difference
i that, because I do it with one small ship, I am called a robber, while you are called an
tnperor because you do it with a great fleet."'—Saint Augustine: De Civitate Det,
ook IV, chap. 4, already quoted in VI. vii. 310, n. i.

This truth had, of course, always been unpalatable to heads of states. Early in the
sar A.D. 1936, one of Hitler's subjects who had invited the writer of this Study to give
lecture in_ Berlin found himself constrained to translate orally to his Fuhrer a passage
i one of this prospective visitor's published works in which the Englishman had written
tat 'it was shocking to see the head of a state—even when he was the leader of a recently
ctorious revolutionary movement—shooting down his own former henchmen in the
yle of an American "gangster" ' on the agth-soth June, 1934 (Survey of International
ffairs, 1934 (London 1935, Milford), p. 325). Hitler's comment on this was: 'That is
)t fair, because the gangsters do it for money, and I did not dp it for that.' The naivet6

this line of defence was engaging, but it did not impugn the justice of the Tyrrhenian,
rate's point.