414 PROSPECTS OF THE WESTERN CIVILIZATION
ing Western Civilization's ambit.1 Already, some two hundred years
before this date, the approaching unification of the entire OikoumenS
round a Western centre had been discerned and announced by a Western
man of genius. In an Esquisse d'un Plan de Geographie Politique Turgot
had put on record the propositions

'que chaque peuple qui a devance les autres dans ses progres est devenu
une espece de centre autour duquel s'est forme comme un monde politique
compose des nations qu'il connaissait et dont il pouvait combiner les
interests avec les siens; qu'il s'est forme plusieurs de ces mondes dans
toute 1'etendue du globe independants les uns des autres, et inconnus
reciproquement; qu'en s'etendant sans cesse autour d'eux, il se sont ren-
contres et confondus, jusqu'a ce qu'enfin la connaissance de tout 1'univers,
dont la politique saura combiner toutes les parties, ne formera plus qu'un
seul monde politique, dont les limites sont confondues avec celles du
monde physique.'3

By A.D. 1950 Turgot's prognostication had been vindicated by accom-
plished facts. By this date the two Islamic civilizations, which had not
yet entered into the universal state phase, were no less compromisingly
enmeshed in a Western net than the five non-Western civilizations
which had passed through this phase already. Even the Russian Civiliza-
tion, which, among these seven societies, had taken the lead, up to date,
in making a fight for the preservation of its own identity, ethos, and
genius, had found, as we have seen,3 that the only practical way of trying
to hold its own against the West was to master the technology which was
the source of Modern Western Power and to step into a Western arena
as a combatant arrayed in a panoply fashioned on the latest Western
model. This world-wide ascendancy of a Western culture, at least on the
plane of Technology, even over the non-Westerners who had dedicated
themselves to the task of leading an anti-Western crusade, might prove
to be a short-lived phenomenon; indeed, a glance at the history of a
post-Alexandrine Hellenic Civilization's impact on the Oriental civiliza-
tions of the day—a history which had long since completed its course and
was therefore on record from beginning to end—seemed to suggest that
a Western ascendancy, in its turn, was likely to be liquidated in the long
run by military, political, and religious counter-attacks of the kind that
had once brought the ascendancy of Hellenism to an end. Yet this
Hellenic precedent seemed also to suggest that even an eventual liquida-
tion of a now prevailing Western ascendancy would come to pass in a
world that had been unified within a framework of Western workman-
ship; and this unique role of a Modern Western Society as a unifying
agency over a literally world-wide range of operations was the second
fact that demanded—in A.D. 1950 no less than in A.D. 1929—a special
consideration of the Western Civilization's prospects.

The third of the facts that seemed to make this inquiry imperative
was the alarming fact that in the twentieth century of the Christian Era,
perhaps for the first time in the history of the Human Race, all Mankind's

1 See V. v. 152-3, and pp. 479-90, below.

a Turgot, A. R.J.: GEuwes, new ed. (Paris 1844, Guillaumin, a vols.), vol. ii, pp. 616-17.

3 In IX. viii. 130-41,