WESTERN EXPERIENCES WITH PRECEDENTS 453
non-Western societies that had found themselves forced to conform in
some degree to an alien Western way of life. An intelligentsia, called into
existence to serve as a corps of interpreters between a proletarianized
'Native' society and an importunate Western 'ascendancy V -was, as we
have observed, the most unhappy and the most explosive of the many
ingredients of which a world-conquering Western Civilization's world-
wide internal proletariat was composed.

The relations between a Western internal proletariat and a Western
dominant minority were further aggravated by a 'colour-bar* in coun-
tries where there was an indigenous or imported proletariat that hap-
pened to have been stamped with the physique of a Black, Brown, or
Yellow Race, and where the dominant minority had been recruited from
Teutonic-speaking descendants of those White barbarians who had bat-
tened on the carcass of a dead Hellenic body social some fifteen hundred
years back in the past. At the time of writing, the worst offenders were
the Dutch-speaking lords and masters of the Union of South Africa; but
the same fundamentally Fascist regime—making a class-distinction in-
effaceable by identifying it with a race-distinction—was being main-
tained under the auspices of English-speaking cousins of the Afrikanders
in Kenya Colony, in 'the Old South* of the United States, and in some
respects—as, for instance, hi a de facto segregation of domiciles—also in
other sections of the North American Republic. Thus, in both a South
African and a North American province of a latter-day Western World,
a 'colour-bar* between divers communities sharing a common country
was setting up, in a new social environment, the institution of Caste,
which, in an Indie World that had been blighted by it, had likewise
originated in a 'colour-bar* according to the tell-tale evidence of its
Sanskrit name.3

In these circumstances it was not surprising to find a Western internal
proletariat retorting to repression by exploding in outbreaks of retalia-
tory violence3 reminiscent of the classical explosions during the second
paroxysm of an Hellenic Time of Troubles.4 The earliest of these out-
breaks had occurred in an expanding Western Civilization's West Euro-
pean homeland; but the Anabaptist terror at Minister in A jx 1543-5 and
the successive Jacobin and Communard terrors in Paris in A.D, 1792-4
and in AJ>. 1871 had been dwarfed in scale, though perhaps not sur-
passed in vindictiveness, by the insurrection of that vast majority of a
latter-day Western internal proletariat which was of non-Western origin.
The first of these anti-Wester11 counter-attacks had been launched by
Peter the Great, the Russian prototype of the Herodian saviour-king in
a Westernizing World, in the Great Russo-Swedish War of A j>. 1700-21;
but the consequent cession of the Baltic Provinces and the Karelian
Isthmus by an eighteenth-century Western to an eighteenth-century
Westernizing Power5 was a trifling loss for the Western Community

i SeeV. v. 154-8.

- 'Colour' is the literal meaning of Varna, the Sanskrit word for •which the Modern
Western languages had found an equivalent in the Portuguese word Casio.

3 See V. v. 167 and 170. * See V. v. 177-80.

3 See Gibbon's observations on this, and the present writer's comments on those
observations, on pp. 752-4, below.