478 PROSPECTS OF THE WESTERN CIVILIZATION
had ceased to be able, unaided, to protect the United Kingdom itself or
what remained of its dependent empire, while the other now fully self-
governing dominions of the British Crown, which had ceased to be able
to count upon effective protection by the United Kingdom's Navy, had
not become capable, unaided, of providing for their own security; and
this meant that all continuing or former states members of the British
Commonwealth, like all Continental European states west of the Soviet
Union's 'iron curtain', must become protectorates of the United States
as the only practicable alternative to their becoming satellites of the
Soviet Union.

This was another way of saying that, in A.D. 1952, the Soviet Union
and the United States found themselves confronting one another as the
only two Great Powers still surviving on the face of the planet; and, in
any international balance of power, two was bound, even at the best, to
be an awkward number. It was true that in this current chapter of
Western international history—in contrast to the situation during the
chapter that had been opened inA.D. 1931 by Japan's initial act of aggres-
sion in Manchuria and had been closed in A.D, 1945 by the overthrow of
both Japan and Germany—the two rival Great Powers were, both of
them, economically 'sated* countries, either of which could find peaceful
employment for the whole of its man-power, for many decades to come,
in cultivating its own garden and developing the still untouched reserves
of human and non-human resources within its own frontiers; and in this
respect the international situation was less dangerous in A.D. 1952 than
it had been before and during the Second World War, when Germany
and Japan had been led into committing aggression by their belief that
they could not continue to provide for a growing population at an
acceptable standard of living within their own frontiers. By contrast,
both the United States and the Soviet Union enjoyed, and admitted to
enjoying, in AJ>. 1952, a freedom from want that made both these sur-
viving Great Powers immune to one of the historic motives for aggres-
siveness. Unfortunately, however, they did not, either of them, enjoy
an equal freedom from the mutual fear that had been the other powerful
motive for aggressiveness in the past; and their fear of one another was
engendered and kept alive by the convergent operation of several dif-
ferent causes.

To begin with, the Russian and American peoples differed in ethos.
The Russian people's habitual and characteristic temper was one of
docile resignation, the American people's one of obstreperous im-
patience; and this difference of temper was reflected in a difference of
attitude towards arbitrary government. The Russians acquiesced in
this as an evil that some six hundred years of experience had schooled
them to regard as inevitable, whereas the Americans' experience of
successfully revolting against arbitrary government by ministers of a
British King George III and successfully preventing any domestic re-
crudescence of arbitrary government during the first century and three
<jaarters of the history of the United States had led them to think of
arbitrary government as an evil which any people could banish if it had
tibe wifi. la consequence, the Americans—including a middle-class-