288 LAW AND FREEDOM IN HISTORY

which once, perhaps, had more or less satisfactorily fulfilled their regu-
lative purpose, came to defeat the intentions of statesmanship by es-
caping from its control and rankling into enormities which were bound,
sooner or later, to liquidate themselves either by destroying the society
on which they had come to prey or alternatively by moving a society
whose life was now at stake to terminate this series of ever more de-
structive wars between parochial states by allowing all the contending
pieces but one to be swept off the board.

The self-amortization of a cyclic rhythm which thus proves to be the
dominant tendency in struggles for existence between parochial states
has previously come to our notice in our study of the disintegrations of
civilizations; and it is not surprising that there should be this visible
affinity between the respective rhythms of two historical processes that
are manifestly bound up with one another. Our study1 of the break-
downs in which the disintegrations of civilizations have originated has
shown us that a frequent occasion, symptom, and even veritable cause of
breakdown has been the outbreak of a war between parochial states in
which a perennial evil that has previously been kept under control and
been practised with moderation now disconcertingly lights up, in one of
its periodical recurrences, to a degree of intensity that is so unprece-
dentedly severe as to constitute a deadly danger to the society's survival.
In the pre-Alexandrine chapter of Hellenic history, for example, the
Atheno-Peloponnesian 'reduplicated general war' of 431-404 B.C. was a
scourge of this unprecedentedly lethal kind, as contrasted with the rela-
tively moderate warfare with one another in which the Athenian and the
Lacedaemonian faction in an Hellenic body politic had been indulging
down to that date since their split in 478 B.C. In the pre-Confucian chap-
ter of Sinic history, similarly, the great war of 634-628 B.C., in which the
principal belligerents were Tsin and Ch'u, marked a corresponding cli-
macteric crisis in a series of cycles of warfare between parochial states.

In our examination of three series of this kind, we have also noticed3
that the replacement of a litter of contending parochial states by a single
oecumenical power is apt to be followed, not by an entire cessation of
recurrent outbreaks of anarchic violence, but by their translation from
the previous form of wars between parochial states into the alternative
form of civil wars and social disorders; and, if we thus find that the
establishment of a universal state does not inevitably bring to an end the
alternating rhythm of War and Peace generated by an antecedent Ba-
lance of Power between parochial states, it is more patently evident that
this achievement of constructive statesmanship, magnificent though it is,
does not avail to reverse, and so avert, a process of disintegration which
it temporarily arrests.

We have observed3 that—in the histories of civilizations down to the
time of writing—the disintegrations of civilizations, like the struggles for
existence between parochial states through which the breakdowns of
civilizations had been precipitated, had run their course in a series of
rhythmic fluctuations; and an empirical survey of ten examples—leaving

1 In IV, passim, in vol. iv. a On pp. 271 and 283. above.

3 In Y. vi. 378-321.