32Z LAW AND FREEDOM IN HISTORY

harmony or in contradiction with historical facts. The business cycles in
the history of an Industrialized Western Society, the war-and-peace
cycles in the histories of the Western, Hellenic, and Sinic societies, and
rhythms discernible in the growths and in the disintegrations of these
and other civilizations are obvious test cases for us to explore.

In our consideration of business cycles in the present context, we have
already come to the conclusion that, in the industrial phase of economic
activity with which these cycles are associated, the laws of Nature whose
currency can be detected are laws inherent in the life of the Human
Psyche itself, and that, even if these psychic laws should prove not to be
solely the laws of Reason which the pure monetary theory of business
cycles was inclined to see in them exclusively, it was recognized by most
authorities that some of them, at least, were laws governing the play of
feelings welling up from the subconscious depths of the Psyche—parti-
cularly the expectant feelings of Hope and Fear. When we pass from the
consideration of the forty-months-long 'Kitchin' business cycles and the
nine-to-ten-years-long 'Juglar* business cycles to the twenty-three-to-
twenty-five-years-long 'Rostow-SpiethofF phases and the forty-to-sixty-
years-long 'KondratiefF business cycles1 which had been keeping time
with the contemporary war-and-peace cycles in latter-day Western his-
tory, and which might turn out to be reflections on the economic plane of
these cycles on the political and military plane, it is evident that the
alternating bouts of war and spells of peace with an average duration of
28-83 years> and the waves, with an average span of 57*66 years, between
successive turning-points in the same direction, either from peace to war
or from war to peace, out of which the three regular war-and-peace
cycles in Modern and post-Modern Western history had been built up,2
could be accounted for convincingly as products of the working of the
Generation Cycle in the transmission of a social heritage.

It is manifest that the survivors of a generation that has been of mili-
tary age during a bout of war will be shy, for the rest of their lives, of
bringing a repetition of this tragic experience either upon themselves or
upon their children, and that therefore the psychological resistance to
any move towards the breaking of a peace that the living memory of a
previous war has made so precious is likely to be prohibitively strong
until a new generation that knows War only by hearsay has had time to
grow up and to come into power. On the same showing, a bout of war,
once precipitated, is likely to persist until the peace-bred generation
that has light-heartedly run into war has been replaced, in its turn, by a
war-worn generation whom these inexperienced war-mongers have sent
to the shambles. Thus the alternating transitions from war to peace and
from peace to war which succeed one another in the three Western
regular war-and-peace cycles at intervals of an average span of 28*83
years could be explained as effects of the periodic breach that is made in
the continuity of a social tradition every time that an experience has to
be transmitted by the generation that has experienced it in its own life to
a generation that has merely learnt of it at second hand. Yet this loss of
compelling first-hand experience in the transition from one generation
* See pp. 230-2, above. * See p. 287, above.