450 PROSPECTS OF THE WESTERN CIVILIZATION taking service, this time, -with an idol standing, not for division, but for unity? Wanderers in a Western -wilderness, astray from their forefathers' One True God, who had been taught by a further bout of disillusioning experience that parochial states, like sectarian churches, were idols whose worship brought not peace but a sword,1 might be tempted to seize upon a Collective Humanity as an alternative object for idolization.3 A 'reli- gion of Humanity' which had missed fire in the frigid mould of a Com- tian Positivism had set the World ablaze when it had been fired from the canon's mouth of a Marxian Communism. Would a life-and-death struggle for the salvation of souls which Christianity had waged and won in its youth against an Hellenic worship of a Collective Humanity em- bodied in oecumenical cults of Dea Roma and Divus Caesar have to be fought out again, two thousand years later, against some latter-day em- bodiment of a worship of the same Leviathan ? The Hellenic precedent raised the question without revealing the answer to a mid-twentieth- century inquirer into the Western Civilization's prospects. If, in our review of Western experiences with non-Western prece- dents, we now pass on from the symptoms of breakdown to the symp- toms of disintegration, we shall recall that, in our analysis of schism in the body social, we found unmistakable traces, in a latter-day Western World, of the epiphany of a dominant minority3 and of an internal and an external proletariat.* The Western World's external proletariat will make little demand upon our attention; for our general conclusion5 that the barbarians had played no more than an insignificant part in the histories of the civilizations was conspicuously borne out by tie situation on the Western World's anti- barbarian marches at the time of writing.6 The fate of the surviving barbarians had been sealed, as far back as the seventeenth century of the Christian Era, by the success of two sedentary Powers in encircling a Eurasian Steppe that had been the most devastating source of barbarian eruptions for at least three thousand five hundred years; and, though neither the Russian nor the Manchu Power had been a Western polity, their combined achievement had redounded to the benefit of a Western Civilization that had been expanding all over the OikoumenS thanks to a mastery, not of the Steppe, but of the Ocean. By A.D. 1952 the last sur- viving enclaves of still recalcitrant barbarians were all manifestly on the verge of being eliminated. By the same date, however, it could already be foreseen that the barbarians would not pass out of existence without leaving their mark on the life of their victorious antagonists. At the very moment when a Western Society armed by a Western Science was conquering the barbarians in the flesh, Barbarism was taking its revenge by finding its way into the souls of its Western conquerors.7 A regressive Western Neobarbarism, which, in the breathing-space be- tween a First and a Second World War, had made so disconcerting an epiphany first in Italy and then in Germany,8 was, of course, morally far * Matt. x. 34. a See IV. iv. 300-3. 3 See V. v. 40-41 and 48-49. * See V. v, 1535-94 and 319-3?- 5 See I. L 58-62 and VIII. viii, passim. * See pp. 743~4. below. 1 See pp. 744-5, below. » See V. Y. 334-7.