LAWS OF NATURE IN CIVILIZATIONS 251
human resources; and, even when the mounting strain of War had pro-
duced a social breakdown, a still belligerent society would still continue
to devote to War an increasing proportion of a strength that would now
be, not increasing, but diminishing.

In an earlier context1 we have watched the Hellenic Civilization follow-
ing this fatal road during its disintegration, and in that instance we
know what fate it was to which an unconscionably belligerent society
condemned itself. In the course of an Hellenic Time of Troubles the toll
taken by War eventually rose to a height at which the Hellenic Society
would have died, forthwith, of the mortal wounds that it had already
inflicted on itself if the then imminent dissolution of the body social had
not been postponed (without being ultimately averted) in consequence
of a sudden overturn of the Balance of Power itself. In the Hellenic
World within the fifty-three years 220-168 B.C. a Balance of Power
between parochial states was inverted into a monopoly of power in the
hands of a universal state through a swift succession of 'knock-out-
blows' with which four out of five Great Powers were laid low by one
victorious survivor.2 This dramatic episode of Hellenic history bore an
ominous likeness to the dramatic course of Western history since A.D.
1914; and both stories alike threw light on a mortality that seemed to be
the inevitable doom of all Balances of Power.

While Balances of Power thus appear to be intrinsically unstable and
transitory, it is still more clearly evident that they could not follow this
secular course from their original installation to their eventual overturn
if they were not kept going in the meanwhile, like spinning tops, by
rhythmically alternating fluctuations. Our next task is therefore to
analyse the regularly recurrent characteristics of the cycle as these
present themselves in Modern Western, post-Alexandrine Hellenic, and
post-Confucian Sinic history, and to put our analysis to an empirical
test by identifying the successive occurrences of the operation of this
cyclic 'law of Nature' in a Western, an Hellenic, and a Sinic international
arena.

Considering the dominance of the part played by War in the working
of a political balance among parochial states, it is not surprising to find
that the most emphatic punctuation in a uniform sequence of events
recurring in one repetitive cycle after another is the outbreak of a great
war in which one Power that has forged ahead of all its rivals makes so
formidable a bid for world dominion that it evokes an opposing coalition
of all the other Powers implicated in this particular system of inter-
national relations.

The storm that thus breaks in the form of *a general war'—as we may
conveniently label a great war of the all-engulfing kind just indicated
—has usually been brewing in the course of a spell of fair weather
following the calming down of the last preceding atmospheric distur-
bance. The derangement of an established equilibrium that is registered
so sensationally in the outbreak of a general war is usually the cumulative
outcome of gradual processes of growth, decay, and divers other forms

1 In III. iii. 150.

a See the quotation from Polybius in III. iii. 312-13, and also IV. iv. 310-14.