TECHNOLOGY, WAR, AND GOVERNMENT 477

into an alliance with Japan in AJ>. 1902 and in European waters by
making an entente with France in A.D. 1904. In the Second World War,
in which both the Japanese and the Italian Navy had gone into action
on the anti-British side, even the countervailing aid of the by this time
immense sea-power of the United States had not enabled British sea-
power to save Hong Kong, Malaya, and the Dutch Empire in Indonesia
from being temporarily overrun by the Japanese at a time when the
whole strength of the British Navy was having to be employed nearer
home on the three-fold task of holding the Levant, screening Great
Britain herself from invasion, and keeping open the western approaches
to the British Isles. In other words, the British Empire's tribulations
during the Second World War had proved conclusively that, on the
strategic plane, the British Empire was now no longer the unitary Power
that it had been so long as the sea-power of the United Kingdom had
been able effectively to protect the whole of the Empire, from its frontage
on the North Sea and the English Channel to its frontage on the China
Seas inclusive; and this dissolution of the British Empire's former
strategic unity had been discounted on the political plane ia advance,
A British statesmanship that had never forgotten the lesson of Great
Britain's disastrous intransigence towards her North American colonies
in A.D. 1775-83 had been forestalling the violent break-up that had been
the Spanish, the Ottoman, and the Danubian Hapsburg Empire's fate
by transforming the British Empire into a Commonwealth of fully self-
governing states since AJ>. 1867, 1848, 1841, or even as early as 1791 if
the local landmarks in the constitutional history of Canada are taken as
indicators of the progress of political devolution in the British Empire
as a whole.1

The voluntary, gradual, and pacific transformation of a once unitary
empire into a free association between an ever-increasing number of
fully self-governing states had been a triumph of good feeling and good

sense which was perhaps almost unique in the political smnals of Man-
kind in Process of Civilization up to date; and this political achievement
reflected credit on the parties that had been willing to receive self-
government in instalments, as weE as on the party that had been
willing to make progressive cessions of political power on its own initia-
tive without waiting to be compelled. The creditableness of the political
process in this British case could not, however, prevent the political
effect of a dissolution of the British Empire by agreement from being
much the same, in the stark terms of power politics, as the political
effect of the break-up of the Spanish, Ottoman, and Danubian Hapsburg
Empires by force. In this case, as in those, the effect had been the
creation of a dangerous political vacuum which the champions of a dis-
solving Hapsburg Monarchy had diagnosed and deprecated when they
had given it the pejorative nickname 'Balkanization% in allusion to the
sequel to the previous break-up of the Ottoman Empire in Rumelia. The
hard fact was that, by AJX 1952, the sea-power of the United Kingdom

1 A convenient list of the dates when responsible government -was granted in the
various British colonies •with populations of West European origin will be found in
Nathan, M.: Empire Government (Ixsndon 19:18, Allen & Uawin), pp, 47-48.