WESTERN EXPERIENCES WITH PRECEDENTS 455 power to sweep off the Asiatic chess-board most of the Western pawns that had been precariously replaced on it in AJ). 1945. The example of an insurgent Asia might be followed by an effer- vescent Africa whose soldiers had seen the World and taken stock of it in the South-East Asian and West European war-zones of a Second World War; and, as the spark ignited by Russian Communism travelled along a train of gun-powder long since laid by Western imperialism, it was not inconceivable that it might fire the native peasantry in a chain of Latin American republics, from Mexico to Paraguay inclusive, that had been planted on the volcanic soil of buried Andean and Central American worlds. A conflagration that had started in Mexico in A.D. 1910 by spontaneous combustion might spread to Peru and Bolivia if the flame were to be fanned by Communism's forced draught. In short, a world- wide proletarian revolt against a world-wide Western ascendancy had now become a possibility with which the West had to reckon; and, for a Western Society at bay, this prospect was daunting. At the same time there were a number of less sensational, but not necessarily on that score less substantial, entries on the other side of the account. The first point that might come to tell in a menaced Western Civiliza- tion's favour was the alloy of Russian nationalism in an Oecumenical Communism that professed, with a show of Pauline fervour, to have risen superior to aM invidious distinctions between Jew and Greek or bond and free.1 For this vein of insincerity, however adroitly it might be veiled, was a flaw in the physique of Communism which exposed it to the danger of death by thrombosis. At a moment when in Eastern Asia the Western cause was suffering grievous immediate adversity, a Western telepathist who could have looked into the hearts of the close-lipped statesmen in the Kremlin might have learnt that they were watching their Chinese allies* rather spectacular military successes against their common Western adversaries with not unmixed feelings. Would Chinese Communists elated by victories over the greatest Power in the Western camp be content to dance to Russia's tune thereafter? The future of Manchuria, Mongolia, and Sinkiang was, after all, of vastly greater im- portance for China and for Russia alike than the future of Indo-China, Hong Kong, and Formosa. The territorial issues between China and Rus- sia were, in fact, both more momentous and more intractable than those between China and the West. Might not a Communist China, flushed with her demonstration of her ability to engage the United States in battle on equal terms, round on Russia with the cutting observation that, in accordance with the Marxian Religion of Humanity that both Russia and China professed, what was sauce for the American goose must be sauce for the Russian gander. A now hard-pressed Western World might per- haps live to see a Communist Russia's Asian Communist allies go a Com- munist Jugoslavia's way; and, at a moment when eager voices were being raised in the United States for a precipitate rearming of a Germany and a Japan who had been flying at the Western Community's throat only seven or eight years back, an English observer could look forward in his 1 i Cor. 3di. 13; GaL iii. 28; Eph. vi. 8; Col. iii, ix.