WESTERN EXPERIENCES WITH PRECEDENTS 445
created a tension of a magnitude proportionate to its own; and the in-
congruity had been so extreme that the tension had become intolerable,

In the history of the Hellenic Civilization this tension had generated
a Time of Troubles -manifesting itself in two paroxysms of inter-state
warfare, of which the second had been more devastating than the first ;T
and the idolization of the ephemeral institution of the city-state had died
so hard in Hellenic hearts2 that the troubles had lasted for four hundred
years—from the outbreak of the Great Atheno-Peloponnesian War in
431 B.C. until the establishment of a Pax Augusta in 31 B.C.—before the
rending tension had been relieved at last by a political revolution that
had brought the political map of the Hellenic World into tardy con-
formity with a unitary economic map which had been in existence by
then for at least five hundred years. The establishment of an Hellenic
universal state to serve as a political framework for an Hellenic oecu-
menical economy had been achieved too late to save the life of the Hel-
lenic Society; it had availed merely to bring it a temporary reprieve; and
the expiry of this four-hundred-years-long period of grace had been the
signal for the demise of a society which had inflicted mortal wounds on
itself at least as early as the onset of the second paroxysm of its Time of
Troubles in the Hannibalic War (gerebatinr 218-201 B.C.). What was
going to be the effect of the same tension, arising from the same incon-
gruity, in the life of a Western World which, since the Industrial Revo-
lution, had become, in its turn, a unity on the economic plane while
continuing to be partitioned on the political plane among a litter of still,
and indeed perhaps now more than ever, fanatically worshipped paro-
chial sovereign states ? Would the Western World, unlike the Hellenic
World, succeed in arriving at some less belated and less radical solution
of this problem than the ultima ratio of abolishing fratricidal warfare
by abolishing the war-generating institution of Parochial Sovereignty
through a liquidation of all existing parochial states and the establish-
ment of a single universal state in their stead ?

One discouraging symptom in Modern Western history had been the
emergence there, first in Prussia and latterly in Germany at large, of a
militarism that had been deadly in the histories of other civilizations.
Militarism was a portentous moral evil because it was an abnormal one.
The minions of human beings who had sacrificed wealth, happiness, and
life itself in fighting the battles of some parochial state, whose subjects
they had happened to be, had mostly gone to war, not because they had
delighted in War for its own sake, but because they had more or less rue-
fully resigned themselves to war-making as an evil necessary for the pre-
servation of another evil—Parochial Sovereignty—to which they had
perversely said *Be thou my good*.3 In contrast to this normal negative
human attitude towards the evil of War, militarism, was a state of mind
in which War had ceased to be looked upon merely as a means of serving
an idolized state and had become an idol and an end in itself; and this
cult of War was manifestly something contrary to Human Nature.
On this showing, it was disquieting for a Western historian to recall in

1 See V. vi. 287-91. a See IV. £v. 303-30.

' Milton: Paradise Lost, Book IV L zzo.