won their independence from Denmark and Spain, and not by the
pacific and amicable process through which the Danubian and the
Spanish Hapsburg Monarchy had parted company.1

Thus, on the eve of the outbreak of a General War of A.D. 1914-18
which was to open the fourth regular cycle in the series, it looked, in the
light of the experience of the past 350 years, as if the current Balance of
Power in the Western World had ensured its own perpetuation for an
indefinite time ahead by progressively increasing the number of the
bases on which it rested until it had come to stand steadily upon eight
legs instead of shakily upon two; and this appearance of security was
enhanced by the spectacle of a row of ninepins standing in between the
legs; for the increase in the number of Great Powers in the Western
system of international relations between A.D. 1556 and A.D. 1914 had
been accompanied by an increase part passu in the number of 'buffer
states' on which the mutually frustrating jealousies of rival Great Powers
around them had bestowed an independence that these pigmies would
have been incapable of either winning or keeping by force of their own
arms. Such 'buffer states' had emerged and survived in so far as the
balanced pressures of their powerful neighbours upon one another had
happened to create and preserve here and there some nook or cranny in
which a militarily impotent minor state could nestle and thrive like a
rock-plant in an interstice between the rugged faces of the untooled
stones in a wall of cyclopean masonry.2

The United States, for example, in her military and political infancy,
had been able to win her independence in the war of A,D. 1775-83 in
North America thanks to a temporary neutralization of British sea-power
by French sea-power, and had then been able to expand westwards
across the Continent by securing the reversion of the Mississippi Basin
through the Louisiana Purchase thanks to a preponderance of British
sea-power over French sea-power in the General War of A.D. 1792-1815
which had made it impossible for Napoleon to take delivery for France
of a Transatlantic territory which he had compelled Spain to rctrocede
to France on paper. The Latin American republics, in their turn, had
owed their independence to a mistrust of the Continental European
Powers that had moved Great Britain to co-operate with the United
States by tacitly putting the sanction of British sea-power behind
President Monroe's announcement of his doctrine on the and December,

1 The first step in the rise of the United States to the rank of a Great Power was the
winning of her independence in the Revolutionary War of A.D. 1775-83, The second
step was the development of her potential strength through the political acquisition and
economic exploitation of a trans-continental territory (a stage com^pondinK to the
geographical expansion of the Danubian Hapsburg Power in and after A.D. 15,36). The
third step was the maintenance of the Union by force of arms in the Civil War of A,».
1861-5 (to which the counterpart in Hapsburg history was the Thirty Years War of
A,D, 1618-48). The fourth step was the victory of the United States in the Spanish-
American War of A.D. 189^8, which drew the United States out of a political isolation
that shethad been maintaining since A.D. 1783, and involved her in commitments overseas,

a This generation of minor states as a by-product of the pressures exerted by rival
Great Powers upon one another, when these pressures neutralize one another, is an out-
come of the Balance of Power which has been noticed in this Study already, apropos of
the emergence of the city-states of Northern and Central Italy in an interstice between
the Holy Roman Empire and the Hildebrandine Papacy (see III. iii, 345-6; IV, iv. 534;
and p. 394, below),