UNPRECEDENTED WESTERN EXPERIENCES 471 disastrous course of a revolution that was as uncircumspect as it was anarchic. Between A.D. 1914 and A.D. 1945 the high tension between a conserva- tive Psyche and a revolutionary Technology had discharged itself in two world wars in one lifetime; and this reduplicated catastrophe had 'put down the mighty from their seat and ... exalted the humble and meek'1 at a pace that was not less bewildering and overwhelming for suddenly exalted novi homines—a Bevin, a Nehru, a Truman, a Stalin—than it was for elder statesmen, proconsuls, financiers, and diplomatists who had been as suddenly deposed from a long-exercised office. In the course of little more than thirty years the North-West European middle class had had to concede a preponderance of political and economic power at home to the industrial workers, and simultaneously to hand over the whole of its previous political and economic power in its former Asiatic domi- nions to a native Asian intelligentsia whose left-handedly sincere way of flattering its European creators and employers by imitation had been to insist on taking their places as the masters in each once subject Asian people's own now emancipated national house. Within the same brief period of time a North-West European middle class that had thus been losing its predominance at home and its ascendancy in Asia had simul- taneously been forfeiting its oecumenical economic and political in- fluence to new supra-national Great Powers of an invincibly higher material calibre that had swiftly loomed up out of great open spaces where they had been able gradually to develop, unthwarted, on the fringes of an OikoumenM2 that since A.D. 1498 had been unified by, and till A.D. 1914 had been centred upon, a diminutive row of half a dozen nation-states along the Atlantic seaboard of Western Europe. In AJD. 1952, when it was already possible to look back on this 'awful revolution'3 as a decisively accomplished fact, the practical question of vital moment for the future of the West and of the World was whether the new holders of power and responsibility had grown in wisdom com- mensurately with their growth in stature.4 People whose experience had been gained, and whose habits of feeling, thinking, and action had been formed, in the negative school of an opposition, in which they had been serving their apprenticeship for decades and even for generations, had now suddenly saddled themselves, or been saddled by the fiat of History, with the moral burden of onerous positive duties. A British industrial working class bred up in a century-old tradition of resisting exploitation by middle-class employers now had to 'make the country pay its way". Indian nationalists bred up in a fifty-years-old tradition of rebelling against the rule of British imperialists now had to 'carry on the* ci-devant 'King-Emperor's government*. American politicians bred up in a one- century-and-three-quarters-old tradition of making it impossible for any American avatar of a British King George III to levy taxation without representation, and Russian autocrats bred up in a six-centuries-old tradi- 1 Lube i. 52. 2 See III. iii. 302-4. 3 Gibboa, E.: 'General Observations cm 1be FaH of the Roman Empire in the West,* at the end of chapter xxxviii of The History of the Det&ne and Fall