236 LAW AND FREEDOM IN HISTORY

extinct, so that the twentieth-century Western historian had the ad-
vantage there of knowing the whole story, such 'non-stop' recurrences of
major wars had been apt to portend historic catastrophes. When, in the
second chapter of Hellenic history, the Decelean War of 413-404 B.C.
had followed the Archidamian War of 431-421 B.C. after an interval of
only eight years, the consequence of this Atheno-Pcloponnesian double
war had been the breakdown of the Hellenic Civilization. When the
Hannibalic War of 218-2.01 B.C. had followed the First Romano-Punic
War of 264-241 B.C. after an interval of only twenty-three years, the
consequence of this Romano-Punic double war had been the first relapse
of a broken down and disintegrating Hellenic Society after its first rally.1
When the Great Romano-Sasanian War of A.D. 603-28 had followed the
Great Romano-Sasanian War of A.D. 572-91 after an. interval of only
twelve years, the consequence had been the obliteration of a frontier
between an Hellenic universal state and recalcitrant Iranian Power which,
reckoning from the date of its original establishment by the Roman
empire-builder Pompey in 64 B.C., had maintained itself for all but seven
hundred years by the time when the momentary restoration of the terri-
torial status quo ante bellum in A.D. 628 was undone, once for all, by an
explosion of Primitive Muslim Arab military force that completed the
liquidation of a post-Alexandrine Hellenic ascendancy south of Taurus
and re-established in the shape of an Arab Caliphate the Syriac universal
state which Alexander had overthrown in the shape of an Achaemcnian
Empire,

At a moment in the post-Modern chapter of Western history at which
the denouement of the double Germano-Western War of A.D. 1914-18
and A.D. 1939-45 was not yet an accomplished fact, the approaching
overturn of a Balance of Power which had maintained its precarious
existence since its inauguration in the last decade of the fifteenth century
had already been announced by a rise in the death-rate of Western or
Westernizing Great Powers that had been as steep as it had been sudden;
and this carnage was ominous, considering that the first law of every
balance, political and physical alike, is that the instability of the equi-
librium varies in inverse ratio to the number of its points d*appui. While
a two-legged stool, chair, or table would be doomed by the unpracticality
of its construction to fall over in a trice, a three-legged stool is capable of
standing by itself, though a corpulent sitter would rest more securely on
a four-legged chair and a careful housewife would prefer a six-legged to
a four-legged table for carrying a display of her best china. Since politics
are never static but are always dynamic, an apter analogy from the
chances and changes of physical life is to be found in the superiority of a
tricycle over a bicycle as a mount for a rider who finds difficulty in keep-
ing his balance, and the superiority of a six-wheeled omnibus over a
four-wheeled car as a vehicle for traversing the sands of the desert. In
the light of these homely physical analogies, the rise and decline in the
number of Western or Westernizing Great Powers between A.D, 1553
and A.D. 1952 was politically most significant.

From the first epiphany of a Modern Western system of international

1 See V. vi. 390-1,