244 LAW AND FREEDOM IN HISTORY

latterly overshadowed all the rest, while France had held the same

position of pre-eminence from A.D. 1648 to A.D. 1815.

In A.D. 1952 the Soviet Union and the United States alone were still
standing erect; and from a strategico-political standpoint the respective
stances of these two Powers vis-a-vis one another were reminiscent of
those of France and the Burgundian-Hapsburg Power some four
hundred years earlier. In an arena which had expanded in the mean-
while beyond the bounds of Western Europe till it had come to be co-
extensive with the entire surface of the planet, a prixc that had expanded
paripassu beyond the bounds of Italy, until it had come to embrace the
whole of the Old World outside the limits of Russia's present domain,
was being contended for in A.D. 1952 between a Russia which enjoyed
the advantages of interior lines, compact metropolitan territory, and
centralized autocratic government, once enjoyed by France, and a United
States whose overwhelming superiority in aggregate strength on paper,
when the assets of her dependencies and her allies were added to her
own, was largely offset in practice, like the strength of the Count-King-
Emperor Charles V, by the liabilities that these assets brought in their
train and by the wide dispersion of the scattered territories and popula-
tions whose resources America had to defend in order to be able to draw
upon them. It was easier for a twentieth-century Russia, as it had been
for a sixteenth-century France, to take her adversary by surprise, in
making sudden sorties in divers directions, than it was for a twentieth-
century United States to mobilize her own and her friends' forces
effectively for the arduous task of containing her adversary all the way
round a line of circumvallation which, scale for scale, was proportionate
in its length to the line which Charles V had once set himself to hold.
The strategico-political bearings of a confrontation of two Great Powers,
and two only, were thus much the same circa A.D. 1952 as they had been
circa A.D. 1552. Yet, in these geographically similar circumstances, the
Western Balance of Power's expectation of life was, for ideological
reasons, decidedly less promising in the twentieth century than it had
been in the sixteenth.

If the division of power in the Western World between no more than
two competitors during the years A.D, 1519-55 had resulted, not in an
increase in the number from the dual to the plural but in the reduction
of a duality to a unity, the most likely way in which this unification
would have been achieved would have been through the negotiation of
one more felicitous dynastic marriage; and, even if a miscarriage of
matrimonial diplomacy had made it impossible to avoid resorting to the
barbarous alternative of unification through force of arms, the unifying
war would still have been a temperate one, like those 'undecisive con-
tests' through which the number of the Great Powers was, not dimi-
nished, but augmented in the course which history actually took during
the three centuries and a half running from A.D. 1556 to A,D, 1914. The
Royal French Valois and the Imperial Burgundian Valois were divided by
nothing more serious than a dynastic rivalry that could have been re-
moved painlessly by a marriage and almost painlessly by a conquest. They
were not estranged from one another by any impassable gulf of incora-