TECHNOLOGY, WAR, AND GOVERNMENT 485

diminutive size of a thimble; and the strategic consequence of the
coming reduction of 'the great open spaces' of Man's once immense
terrestrial habitat to the dimensions of a Lilliput had already been visible
to the mind's eye of a prophetically imaginative Victorian English
mathematician.

* "What is the smallest world you would care to inhabit?" . . .

' "You don't mean to say you have been trying experiments in that
direction 1" I said.

* "Well, not experiments exactly. We do not profess to construct planets.
But a scientific friend of mine, who has made several balloon-voyages,
assures me he has visited a planet so small that he could walk right round
it in twenty minutes! There had been a great battle, just before his visit,
which had ended rather oddly : the vanquished army ran away at full speed,
and in a very few minutes found themselves face-to-face with the victorious
army, who were marching home again, and who were so frightened at
finding themselves between two armies that they surrendered at once!" >x

At a date no more than half way through the twentieth century,
current Western improvements in the technique of overland transport
had not yet arrived at such a perilous pitch of efficiency as to have made
it likely that a vanquished North Korean Army, if it had been thrown
out of North Korea in a north-westerly direction by a victorious United
Nations Army in A.D. 1952, would have cannoned into a dumbfounded
American Army in Bavaria. The technique of maritime transport had,
on the other hand, already been brought to a point at which a United
Nations Army, if it were to be dislodged or withdrawn from South Korea
in AJX 1952, might be ferried round the globe in a trice to confront a
Russian Army on the Elbe ; and the contemporary progress in the tech-
nique of aerial transport had already left the utmost achievements of
maritime and overland transport far behind. In A.D 1952 there was talk
of aeroplanes which would be able to circumnavigate the Equator with-
out having to break their flight in order to refuel, and which, when
travelling from east to west, would be able to arrive before they had
started by flying faster than the speed of the planet's eastward rotation
round its axis; and presumably a single mechanical dragon of the kind
could be freighted with bombs lethal enough to do execution on the
appalling scale contemplated in the Book of the Revelation of Saint John
the Divine. An Oikoumeng which had been so rapidly coalescing and
contracting bad, in fact, no less rapidly been transforming itself from, a
common home into a common abattoir for the Human Race.

JTavresr T& Ba,va.T

In contemplating the straits to which the Human Race had thus
brought itself in the twentieth century of the Christian Era through the
*annihilation of distance* by a Western Civilization's prowess in Techno-
logy, an historian would recollect that this was not the first instance of an
abrupt change of scale in the histories of the civilizations. In Western
history itself, for example, there had been a previous change of the kind

* Lewis Carroll: Sylote and Bruno CWrfc«2«? (London 1889, Macrxrillan), pp. 169-70.
2 PaBadasof Atexandria in tiw j4irtAo&gMi Foia^o, Book X, No. 85.