ARE LAWS INEXORABLE OR CONTROLLABLE? 343
answer to an identical question regarding the prospects during a Time of
Troubles.

When once a Time of Troubles has passed over into a universal state,
there are manifest inherent obstacles to recuperation that are so serious
that they may well be insurmountable. To begin with, it is difficult to
imagine how a society could have purchased peace-at this price without
having involuntarily inflicted mortal wounds upon itself. The price of a
pax oecumenica imposed through the establishment of a universal state is,
after all, a sacrificial price; for it is nothing less than the elimination, by
force of arms, of all the previously contending parochial states save one
which, if it does not die of its wounds, has to pay for its survival by
suffering a grievous derangement of its life; and, in this political heca-
tomb, the parochial regnaperitura\hs.TD£ekf&s are the least valuable of the
treasures that are destroyed; for, in the process of becoming the idols
of infatuated communities, these political Juggernauts have a way of
centring round themselves many of the non-poHtical elements in a now
disintegrating civilization's life; and, by the time when the progressive
exacerbation of the Time of Troubles has come to threaten the stricken
society with imminent death, it is as impracticable to overthrow these
idols without simultaneously shattering the treasures now inextricably
associated with them as it is imperative to overthrow these idols, what-
ever the cost. *Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant'1 is, for this
reason, an indictment on which all architects of universal states are
bound in the nature of the case to be found guilty; and, for our present
purpose, it is beside the point to argue whether or not the stricture is
morally just; for, however convincingly the defendant may plead that he
has saved a suffering world from a greater evil at the cost of inflicting on
it a lesser evil in a situation in which no third choice was open to him, he
will find it difficult to rebut the charge that even this lesser evil to which
he has thus made himself a party is in the first place irretrievable and in
the second place necessarily fatal in the long run to the afflicted body
social.

If we may employ the homely simile of the eggs and the omelette, and
identify the eggs with our clutch of contending parochial states, we may
say that, during a Time of Troubles, down to the moment when it is
liquidated through the establishment of a universal state, soine, at any
rate, of the eggs are likely to have remained unbroken, however severely
even these may have been battered; but, when once the cook has con-
verted all that is left of the eggs into an omelette, he has put it beyond
his own or anyone else's power ever to reconstruct the eggs again by
the impossible feat of putting scrambled yolks back inside broken shells.
Moreover, as we have noticed in another context,2 the chef's successors
will find it beyond their power to preserve even the scrambled relics of
broken eggs unadulterated, though, in originally making the omelette,
the cook was aiming solely at preserving at least some recognizable ves-
tige of his drastically processed raw materials. Time soon shows that the
omelette will not keep without an infusion of preservatives, and these
indispensable condiments inevitably de-nature the omelette's texture

* Tacitus: Agricola, chap. 30. 2 In VI. vii. 57-60,