362 LAW AND FREEDOM IN HISTORY

to be commended by the evidence that we have just been marshalling;
for one manifestly weak point in the implicit argument is that the
evidence, impressive though it looks when viewed en gros, does not
cover, at the human climax of the story, more than the intellectual and
technological sides of Man's nature and activity; and the formidably
clear-cut picture of imminent and apparently inescapable disaster falls
out of focus as soon as we begin to make it more true to real life by
bringing Man's aesthetic and religious faculties and activities into the
frame. The value of this specious hypothesis of a secular acceleration in
the tempo of change lies, not in any intrinsic probability of its own, but
in its testimony against the probability of the hypothesis that the tempo
is invariable.

3. Instances of Retardation

Now that we have mustered these divers instances of acceleration in
the tempo of cultural change, we shall not find it difficult to identify
antithetical instances of retardation.

For example, the accelerations that declare themselves in revolutions
within the family circle of a single society have their antithesis in the
social enormities that are generated by a straggler's refusal to try to
catch up with the progress of the main body.1 A classical example of an
enormity arising from a wilful retardation is the exacerbation of the
Modern Western institution of Plantation Slavery in the Southern
States of the American Union during the generation that elapsed be-
tween the peaceful abolition of Slavery throughout the British Empire
in A.D. 1833 and its forcible abolition in the United States in A.D. 1863
at the cost of the Civil War of A.D. i86i~5.2

The acceleration that is demanded of marchmen when they are in-
ducted into the life of more precocious communities in the interior, and
into which the transfrontier barbarians are spurred at a hotter pace
when they pour across a fallen limes into the derelict provinces of a
universal state, has its antithesis in the retardation that is apt to be the
price of migrating, in the opposite direction, from the heart of a society
towards its extremities. Classical examples are the living museums'3 in
which a seventeenth-century Normandy, Ulster, England, and Holland,
and a sixteenth-century Castile and Portugal, were still to be found in a
twentieth-century Quebec, Appalachia, Charleston, Transvaal, Peru,
and Macao. The moral bouleversement that registers a barbarian invader's
inability to accelerate the pace of his cultural adaptation to the almost
prohibitively extreme degree demanded by the suddenness of his trans-
lation from an unreclaimed wilderness into a derelict paradise has its
antithesis in a previous arrest of this adolescent's psychic development
that has registered his frustration when he has found himself barred out
by a military limes whose sudden creation at the moment of a universal
state's establishment is as portentous an event in an external proletariat's
experience as the sudden collapse of the limes when the universal state
eventually breaks up.

In the field of encounters in the Space-dimension an Herodianism

1 See IV. iv. 136-7. z See IV. iv. 137-41. 3 See III. iii. 134-9.