500 PROSPECTS OF THE WESTERN CIVILIZATION
by the experience of learning through suffering (rraflei padcs) ;T and since
A.D. 1914 the Germans had received, in their repeated punishment for a
repeated sin, a double measure of this sovereign spiritual education.
'Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom
He receiveth',2 was a timeless truth that held out hope for the conversion
of the Germans in the sixth decade of the twentieth century of the
Christian Era.

No doubt the non-German West Europeans, in their dealings with
their German neighbours at this critical time, might, while putting their
trust in God, still feel inclined, en attendant, to keep their power dry.3
Yet, notwithstanding the openness of this question concerning Ger-
many, by the year A.D. 1952 it looked as if, in a Western Europe which
had already been put to the torment of a Second World War, dispirited
nations and exasperated social classes had been reduced, by the com-
bined operation of the psychological forces analysed above, to a temper
in which their moral capacity to offer resistance to a world-conqueror
would be at a minimum.

The Significance of Hitler's Bid for World-Dominion

The opportunity for political crime on an oecumenical scale which
had been opened up by a recession of Militarism in Western Europe had
indeed been visible to Hitler as early as the morrow of the First World
War.

Hitler had perceived that, in a World whose peoples were all now
miserably war-weary and war-shy, world-dominion might be the easy
prize of any nation that could still be coaxed, duped, doped, or flogged
by an audacious demagogue or despot into being one degree less unwar-
like than its neighbours. 'In the realm of the blind the one-eyed man is
king.1 On the strength of this intuition Hitler had cold-bloodedly remili-
tarized Germany and then attacked Poland, four small West European
countries, and France; and the sensationally successful results of these
successive criminal acts had testified to the correctness of Hitler's cal-
culations up to that point. The German people, for the second time in
one lifetime, had duly allowed themselves, not only to be used by a
German Government as instruments for the commission of an interna-
tional crime, but to be induced to play this criminal role with all their
heart, soul, mind, and strength;4 a Polish people that had remained
exceptional in having lost nothing of its martial spirit had been over-
whelmed by a German aggressor's crushing superiority on the plane of
Military Technology; and the collapse of Hitler's West European victims
had justified Hitler's thesis that, in the state of mind and feeling then
prevalent in Western Europe, a small margin of superiority in martial
spirit might earn for a boldly wicked aggressor a fabulous dividend in
military conquests. Hitler was reported to have said, and this not in
jest, that all good pacifists ought to wish him success because the con-

1 Aeschylus: Agamemnon, 1. 177, quoted in this Study, passim.
z Heb. zii. 6.

3 Tut your trust in God, my boys, and keep your powder dry' (Blacker, Valentine:
Oliver's Advice). + Mark xii. 30.