474 PROSPECTS OF THE WESTERN CIVILIZATION
point-blank range of one another round the circumference of the globe
by 'annihilating distance*. The situation thus created was so formidable,
as well as so novel, that it called for a closer analysis.

The deadliness of the rate of the casualties among the Great Powers
during these first thirty-one years of a new bout of Western warfare was
grimly evident in retrospect. It was now clear that political and military
power—and, by implication, economic power as well, in an industrialized
and mechanized world—were being concentrated at a headlong pace;
and the effect of a now manifest tendency upon its victims' minds and
feelings was the sharper inasmuch as this dominant undercurrent of
international affairs had been concealed, in and after the peace-settle-
ment following the General War of A.D. 1914-18, by a short-lived
tendency in the opposite direction that, at the time, had been con-
spicuous1 just because it had been superficial.

By breaking up one Great Power, the Danubian Hapsburg Monarchy,
and one ci-devant Great Power, the Ottoman Empire, and temporarily
maiming and crippling two other Great Powers, Germany and Russia,
the War of AJD. 1914-18 had permitted a previously dammed-back wave
of Nationalism—rampant among politically un-unified and un-liberated
peoples who had been dazzled by the historic success of the classical
nation-states of Modern Western Europe2—to increase, at those four
stricken Powers' expense, the number of the states of a medium and a
small calibre in the Western international comity. During the preceding
forty-three-years-long lull (durdbat A.D. 1871-1914) between the end of
the aftermath of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and the out-
break of the First World War, the political unification of Italy and of
Germany had reduced the number of the lesser states in the Western
system to a minimum and had indeed temporarily removed from the
map all remaining states of a medium calibre with the sole exception of
. Spain. In the peace-settlement of A.D. 1919-21 this medium class of
states had been reintroduced on to the political map by the reconstitu-
tion of Poland and by the aspiration of Brazil to have outgrown the
stature of a small state even if she might not yet be deemed to have
attained the dimensions of a Great Power.3

In the constitution of the League of Nations the success of the lesser
states' self-assertion during the first decade after the close of the First
World War had been registered in AJD. 1922 in the raising of the number
of non-permanent seats on the Council from the provisional minority
figure, originally agreed in A.D. 1919, of four, as against the minimum
number of five permanent seats then reserved for Great Powers,4 to the
majority figure of six, as against four;5 and in A.D. 1926 the Great Powers

1 See Toynbee, A. J.: The World after the Peace Conference (London 1925, Milford),
pp. 24-43, especially the comparative table, on pp. sz-34, of states, below the rank of
Great Powers, which were playing an active part in international affairs before and after
tfae War of A.D. 1914-18.

8 See IV. iv. 185-90.

3 See Toynbee, A. J., op, cit., pp. 35-36, and Toynbee, A. J., and Boulter, V. M.:
Starry ojInternational Affairs, 1926 (London 1928, Milford), p. 21.

* See the original text of Article 4 of the Covenant of the League of Nations.

» See Toynbee, A. J., and Boulter, V. M.: Survey of International Affairs, 1926
1938, MUfoad), pp. 10-14.