WESTERN EXPERIENCES WITH PRECEDENTS 447
albeit at the cost of a terrible civil -war in one province of the Western
World in which a 'peculiar institution' had been obstinately maintained
for some thirty years after its abolition in the Western World at large.1
A Western World which had succeeded in abolishing Slavery in the
nineteenth century of the Christian Era might surely take heart from the
memory of this unprecedented victory of a Christian ideal in a Western
arena as it addressed itself in the twentieth century to Herakles1 next
labour, namely the attempt to abolish the coeval institution of War; for
War and Slavery had been twin cancers of Civilization ever since this
species of society had first emerged; and the nineteenth-century con-
quest of one of these two fell social diseases was therefore a good augury
for the Western Society's prospects in its twentieth-century campaign
against the disease of War.

The abolition of Slavery in a nineteenth-century Western World had
also been a particularly notable triumph on two accounts. In the first
place Slavery, lite War, had been a potent cause of mortality among
civilizations in the past. Slavery as an instrument of government and
war had conspired with War itself to bring an Ottoman Civilization to
grief;2 Slavery as an instrument of specialization in economic production
had similarly conspired with War to bring an Hellenic Civilization to grief
during the second paroxysm of its Time of Troubles;3 and a Modern
Western Society's decisive victory over an evil that had thus proved al-
most as puissant as War in defeating other civilizations in the past was
therefore impressive evidence of moral health in a latter-day Western
body social. The second reason why the abolition of Slavery in a nine-
teenth-century Western World was noteworthy was because this evil in
this century in this social milieu had been raised to a potency without
precedent in any previous chapter of Western history by the impact of
the new motive-power of Industrialism. On the cotton plantations in
'the Old South' of the United States, Slavery had been harnessed to the
production of a crop supplying the raw material for a mechanized textile
industry which was the master craft of Industrialism in that stage of its
development. A victory over an ancient social institution into which a
youthful Industrialism had put a demonic new 'drive* was a victory that
might well be pregnant with future moral triumphs.

Moreover, a Western Society that in AJX 1952 was still being worsted
by War, eighty-seven years after its triumph over Slavery, could take
heart from its record on other spiritual battlefields where the issue was
still in the balance.

In its response to a challenge presented by the impact of Industrialism
on the institution of Private Property,4 the Western Society had already
made some headway in Great Britain, the Scandinavian countries, New
Zealand and Australia in forcing a passage between Scylla and Charybdis,
The empirical compromises between Free Economic Enterprise and
Socialism that were being worked out in those countries in that genera-
tion promised on the one hand to steer clear of an untempered economic
individualism that would have driven all but a masterful minority to the

i See TV. iv. 137-41. 2 See III. iii. 22-50.

* See IV. iv. 507-8 and V. v. 69-70. * See IV. iv. 191-2,