34* LAW AND FREEDOM IN HISTORY

the Western peoples, and the American people perhaps above all, were
manifestly conscious of a load of responsibility that was weighing upon
them. 'See, I have set before thee this day Life and Good and Death and
Evil.*1 Mid-way through the twentieth century of the Christian Era,
Westerners saw themselves confronted with choices which might per-
haps decide the fate, not merely of their own society, but of all Mankind;
and, in looking to past experience for light to guide them in taking
momentous decisions, they were turning to the only human source of
wisdom which had ever been at the disposal of Mankind—though wise
men had also never failed to recognize that the lessons of experience
could not be applied automatically to grind out cut-and-dried solutions
for current problems. In the twentieth century, Western minds were
seeking hi Mankind's historical experience for such guidance as ex-
perience could be expected to give; but they could not turn to History for
light on how they ought to act without first putting to the oracle the
preliminary question: Did History give them any assurance that they
were really free agents ? The lesson of History, after all, might turn out to
be, not that one choice would be better than another choice, but that
their sense of being free to choose was merely a flatteringly oppressive
illusion, and that hi truth it was out of their power to affect their own
future. A comparison of the unfinished history of the Western Civiliza-
tion with the histories of other civilizations in which the whole story was
already known from beginning to end might inform, the living generation
of Westerners that they were in a phase in which their future no longer
lay even partially in their own hands. The lesson of History might be
that there was nothing now for them to do except to recognize, and
resign themselves to, a doom from which there was no possibility of
escape.

Was there indeed a stage in the disintegration of a civilization at which
it ceased to be possible for human intellects and wills to recover control
and to make use of this recaptured power by taking rational steps to avert
an irretrievable disaster? In the regularly recurring pattern of the disin-
tegration-process there was at least one landmark that was so outstanding
as to be unmistakable whenever it was reached, and this was the termina-
tion of a Time of Troubles through the establishment of a universal state
as a result of the forcible liquidation of all previously contending paro-
chial states save one. At stages in the course of disintegration before this
mark was reached and passed, was a recovery still feasible ? In answer to
this first question, perhaps the most that could be said was that, among
all the untoward developments that were characteristic of a Time of
Troubles, there was no sign of any that would make a recovery inherently
impossible, though no doubt it would always be harder to recover from a
relapse after a rally than to recover from an original breakdown that had
not yet been repeated. The second question that presented itself was
whether there was likewise no ground for assuming a recovery to be
impossible after the establishment of a universal state, and in this case
we might find ourselves giving a decidedly pessimistic answer with rather
more assurance than we might have felt in giving a tentatively optimistic

1 Dcut. xxx. 15. Cp. 19.