general war itself and its martial epilogue as the mildness of this epilogue
presents to the severity of the antecedent general war.

Now that we have plotted out the typical physiognomy of a war-and-
peace cycle, our next step must be to set out in tabular form1 the succes-
sive occurrences of this sequence of phenomena in the Modern and post-
Modern chapters of Western history.

This table shows that, in the course of the four and a half centuries
that had elapsed between the last decade of the fifteenth century of the
Christian Era, when this particular Balance of Power had been installed
in the Western World, and the year A.D. 1953, the repetitive cycle
through which a precariously unstable equilibrium had been turbulently
maintaining itself had so far revolved live times over, counting in the
overture to the series as well as the still uncompleted fourth round of
the subsequent cycles. The table also shows that this fourth cycle, as
well as the overture, had departed from the norm represented by the
three regular cycles that had occurred between A.TX 1568 and A.n. 1914,
and that, among these three, the second and the third cycle were closer
replicas of one another than the first cycle was of cither of them.

The departures of the overture and the fourth cycle from the norm
were not of the same kind; for the fourth cycle differed from the over-
ture and from the preceding three regular cycles alike in its structure,
whereas the overture resembled the regular cycles in its structure and
differed from them only in its wave-length.

The structural novelty of the fourth cycle was, as we have seen,2 the
portentous one of capping one general war with another one of still
greater severity, atrocity, and inconclusiveness, instead of following it up
with a burst of milder, but nevertheless more conclusive, supplementary
wars that, on the precedent of the uniform sequence of events in each of
the preceding cycles, were to be expected as the sequel to a breathing-
space. There was no such radical difference of structure between the
three regular cycles and the overture. In the overture, as in the regular
cycles, a breathing-space after a general war had duly been followed by
supplementary wars which had duly been followed, in their turn, by a
general peace. The difference in this case was merely a chronological one.
The overture's duration of seventy-four years (currebat A.D, 1494-1568)
had been not much longer than the maximum wave-length of a single
*Kondratieff cycle' on the economic plane of latter-day Western history,
and not quite so long as the sum of a couple of minimum wave-lengths
of the same economic 'long cycle',3 whereas the duration of the second
and third regular cycles (cwrebant A.D. 1672-1792 et A,D. 1792-1914),
running, as it had done, to 120 years in the one case and 122 years in the
other,4 had been equal to the sum of a couple of maximum 'Kondratieff

* See Table I, opposite, a On p. 23;;, above.

3 These 'Kondratieff cycles' with wave-lengths ranging between maxima of about
sixty years and minima of about forty years have been noticed on pp. 331-2, above.

* These are the respective wave-lengths found for Cycles II nnd III by measuring the
intervals between outbreaks of general wars; and the durations of 104 years and 74 years,
found for Cycle I and for the overture respectively, are obtained by measurements on
the same basis. This basis is the obvious one to take, since the outbreaka of ceueral wars
are, as we have observed, the most emphatic of all the punctuations marking out the
uniform sequence of events composing each of these repetitive cycles, An alternative