442 PROSPECTS OF THE WESTERN CIVILIZATION belligerent parochial sovereign states was the true, though unavowed, religion of a great majority of the inhabitants of the Westernizing World of the day1 and, secondly, because this false and maleficent religion had been the death of no less than fourteen civilizations for certain, and per- haps of no less than sixteen, out of the twenty-one civilizations that had come into existence during the currency of this species of Society up to date. Fratricidal warfare of ever increasing violence between parochial sovereign states had been by far the commonest cause of mortality among civilizations of all three generations.2 In the first generation it had certainly been the destruction of the Sumeric3 and the Andean4 Civiliza- tion, and probably the destruction of the Minoan5 as well. In the second generation it had destroyed the Babylonic,6 the Indie,7 the Syriac,8 the Hellenic,9the Sinic5I0theMexic," andtheYucatec.12 In the third genera- tion it had destroyed the Orthodox Christian Civilization, both in its main body13 and in its Russian offshoot;14 the Far Eastern Civilization in its Japanese offshoot;13 the Hindu16 and the Iranic.17 Of the,five re- maining known representatives of the species of Society to which the Western Civilization belonged, we may suspect that the Hittite Civiliza- tion likewise had brought itself to ruin by fratricidal warfare at home before it had run full tilt against a petrified Egyptiac World and had subse- quently succumbed to a barbarian Volkerwanderung;18 and there were only four foundered civilizations whose evil genius had probably or certainly been an idol of a different clay. The evidence about the break- down and disintegration of the Mayan Civilization that had been yielded by archaeological exploration so far was negative in the sense that it snowed hardly a trace of any ravages of fratricidal warfare;19 the more abundant evidence about the breakdowns of the Egyptiac Civilization and the Far Eastern Civilization in China indicated that the idol to which these had sacrificed their lives had been, not Parochial Sovereignty as- serting itself in fratricidal warfare, but an oecumenical polity—'the Old Kingdom' in the one case20 and in the other case the Sui and T'ang evoc- ation of a ghost of the Han Empire21—which had brought with it the additional incubus of a more and more top-heavy and parasitic bureau- cracy. The incubus of a parasitic Nomad institution in partibus agricola- rum—the slave-ascendancy of the Egyptian Mamluks22—may have been the death of the Arabic Civilization,23 unless the fate of this society was a solitary instance of assassination by the hand of an alien assailant.24 An idol whose cult had thus proved fatal to fourteen or sixteen out of twenty-one representatives of the species of Society to which the Western Civilization belonged manifestly could not be worshipped by its latter- day Western devotees with impunity. This form of collective self-wor- See 1. 1. 442-5. See IV. iv. 105. See IV. Iv. 66. See IV. iv. 65-66. See IV. iv. 73-73. See IV. iv, 99-100. See IV. iv. 108. * See II. H. 376; III. iii 3 See IV. iv. 112. 2 S< I 2C 4495 se V. v. 41-43 and 189. See IV. iv. 64-65. See IV. iv. 67-68. See IV. iv. 105-6. See IV. iv. 96. See IV. iv. 107. See I. i. 136-^7 and 141-3, and VI. vii. 19. * See IV. iv. 64. a See IV. iv. 101-3. 9 See IV. iv. 62-63. 12 See IV. iv. 105-6. Js See IV. iv. 94. is See IV. iv. 108-12. and 1X1. iii, 212-15. « See III. iiL 30-31. 24 See IV. iv. 113-14.