LAWS OF NATURE IN CIVILIZATIONS 243
outlook wore a deceptively promising appearance. Even if, as was being
prophesied by the more sensational-minded publicists at the turn of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a Danubian Hapsburg Monarchy
that had prolonged its life by coming to terms with Magyar nationalism
in the Austro-Hungarian Ausgleich of A.D. 1867 were nevertheless to
break up, after the death of the venerable King-Emperor Francis Joseph,
under the pressure of Slav national movements which the partial settle-
ment of A.D. 1867 had left unsatisfied, the effect on the general system of
international relations in the Western World that was expected to follow
from a local Danubian debacle was merely a reduction of the number
of the Great Powers from eight to seven. In A.D. 1912 even the boldest
prophet would not have dreamed of forecasting that by A.D. 1952 the
number would have been reduced, as it actually had been, from the
figure of eight which it had reached at the turn of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries to the figure of two at which it had stood between
A.D. 1519 and A.D. I556;1 yet this drastic reduction had taken place
within a span of thirty-two years running from A.D. 1914 to A.D. 1945
inclusive.

The break-up of the Danubian Monarchy, which had duly resulted
from the General War of A.D. 1914-18, had proved in the event to be
only the first of half a dozen casualties. On the morrow of the General
War of A.D. 1939-45 a Prussia-Germany which had gone from strength
to strength, until she had come, twice in one life-time, within an ace of
conquering the World, now lay not only prostrate but partitioned, with
her eastern frontier pushed back westwards to the line at which it had
stood eight hundred years earlier.a In Germany's Assyrian fate an
Israelite prophet would have seen God's judgement on Germany's
Assyrian crimes of deliberately inflicting on Mankind, twice in one life-
time, the awful sufferings of a general war and cold-bloodedly violating,
in the course of her two orgies of aggression, the neutrality of s«ven out
of those nine West European minor states whose immunity from the
blood-tax that was the price of counting as a Great Power had been the
touch-stone of the moral worth of a latter-day Western system of inter-
national relations. Milder chastisements had requited the punier out-
rages committed by a National-Socialist Germany's accomplices, Italy
and Japan; but the death that had likewise been the fate of the other
Great Powers who had been less guiltily involved in the Western general
wars of A.D. 1914-18 and A.D. 1939-45 could not be interpreted so con-
vincingly as having been the wages of sin.3 Great Britain and France, as
well as Italy and Japan, had failed to stay the course, as the Netherlands
and Sweden had failed two hundred years earlier, though the British
Empire, like Prussia-Germany, had grown, during the two hundred
years ending in A.D. 1914, to a stature at which these two Powers had

1 The undivided Hapsburg Power which Charles V had held together before his
abdication in A.D. 1555/6 had come into his hands by successive stages during the years
A.D. 1515-19. On the sth January, 1515, he had inherited the Burgundian dominions;
on the asrd January, 1516, he had succeeded King Ferdinand as King of Aragoni and
Castile; on the izth January, 1519, he had succeeded Maximilian I as ruler of the
hereditary dominions of the House of Hapsburg; on the z8th June, 1519, he had suc-
ceeded Maximilian I as Holy Roman Emperor.

a See II. ii 169. 3 R°m. vi. a.