LAWS OF NATURE IN CIVILIZATIONS 235
proven' on these longer cycles* claims to be economic realities.1 The
political evidence bore out the view, entertained by judicious economic
inquirers,2 that the apparitions of economic 'long waves' might not be
hallucinations but might be economic reflections of political realities
that had already been 'a going concern' in the Modern Western World
for some three hundred years before the outbreak of the Industrial
Revolution in Great Britain.3 In any case, whatever the political cycles*
relations to the economic cycles might eventually prove to be, there were
indications that the political cycles, like their economic counterparts,
were changing in character in accordance with a secular trend. Recurrent
Western wars, for example, were, as we shall see, apparently becoming
progressively shorter and sharper, while conversely the alternatingly re-
current spells of peace in Western political history had, as we shall also
see, tended to occupy a progressively greater aggregate number of years
in each successive peace-and-war cycle down to the outbreak of the
general war of A.D. 1914-18, though at the same time these progressive
chronological gains for Peace at War's expense were being offset by a
progressive aggravation of the economic, the political, and (above all) the
spiritual devastation produced by wars when these did recur.

In studying the evidence for the currency of 'laws of Nature' in the
economic affairs of a latter-day Western Society, we have noticed that
inquirers who believed such laws to be both current and ascertainable
were also aware that their validity was confined to a monetary and in-
dustrial economic regime which had not established itself, even in its
birthplace in Great Britain, before the later decades of the eighteenth
century and which might be expected eventually to pass out of existence
after an ephemeral appearance, and a still briefer oecumenical ascen-
dancy, on the stage of History.4 At the time of writing, mid-way through
the twentieth century, the Balance of Power had had a longer innings
than Industrialism had had so far in the history of the Western Civiliza-
tion, since the epiphany of the Modern Western Balance of Power had
been coeval with the opening of the modern chapter of Western history
in the last quarter of the fifteenth century, some three hundred years
before Industrialism had made its appearance. On the other hand a
mortality which, in the history of Western industrialism, was at this time
still no more than an academic expectation, was perhaps already assert-
ing its dominion over the Balance of Power between parochial Western
states.

A post-Modern Age of Western history which had opened in the
seventh and eighth decades of the nineteenth century5 had seen the
rhythm of a Modern Western war-and-peace cycle broken, in the course
of its fourth beat, by the portent of one general war following hard at the
heels of another, with an interval of only twenty-five years between the
outbreaks in A.D. 1939 and in A.D. 1914, instead of the interval of 120
years or more which had separated A.D. 1914 from A.D. 1792 and A.D.
1792 from A.D. 1672. In the histories of civilizations that were already

1 See pp. 330-2, above,

2 For example, by W. W. Rostow, in the passage cited on p. 231, above.

3 See pp. 286-7, below. * See pp. 224-6, above. s See I.i. I, n. 2.