502 PROSPECTS OF THE WESTERN CIVILIZATION
after he had failed to subdue Great Britain and had succeeded in moving
the United States to convert herself into 'the arsenal of Democracy*.

It will be seen that Hitler's eventual failure to impose peace on the
World by force of arms was due, not to any flaw in his thesis that the
World was ripe for conquest, but to an accidental combination of inci-
dental errors in his measures for putting into execution a nefarious grand
design that, in itself, was a feasible scheme for profiting by a correctly
diagnosed psychological situation. A twentieth-century World, that had
thus, in A.D. 1933-45, been reprieved, thanks only to a chapter of lucky
accidents, from a fate which Mankind's patently increasing defeatism
and submissiveness had almost provocatively invited, could hardly count
upon any future would-be world-conqueror's being so clumsy as to let
the same easy prey escape for the second time by allowing himself to
blunder in his turn into an Hitlerian combination of egregious errors; and,
if a future follower in Hitler's footsteps was unlikely to make Hitler's
mistakes, he could, on the other hand, be sure of profiting by his Nazi
forerunner's pioneer work in clearing the ground for a successor to culti-
vate; for, in failing by so narrow a margin to win the prize of world-
dominion for himself, Hitler had left the prize dangling within the reach
of any successor capable of pursuing the same ami of world-conquest
with a little more patience, prudence, and tact.

The yeoman service that Hitler had performed for some future archi-
tect of a Pax Oecumenica was his historic achievement of forcing an
oecumenical society that had already been devastated by one world war
to inflict upon itself, within the lifetime of the generation that had been
smitten by that shattering catastrophe, a Second World War that had
brought still more grievous tribulations upon the World at large, and
especially upon Europe. An Hitlerian 'revolution of destruction'1 was an
irrevocably accomplished fact by the time when Hitler came to grief;
and the collapse of all Hitler's designs for the aggrandizement of Ger-
many left this negative result of his criminal career intact. In A.D. 1953
it was manifest that, in failing to win world-dominion for his own abor-
tive Third German Reich, Hitler had bequeathed, to any successor with
the ability to take advantage of this opportunity, the legacy that Assyria
had bequeathed to the Achaemenidae, Ts'in She Hwang-ti to Han Liu
Pang, and Pompey and Caesar to Augustus.2 Hitler, finding the peoples
of a twentieth-century Westernizing World already psychologically de-
vastated by the experience of one world war, had left them more than
doubly devastated by a more harrowing repetition of the same experience
within the same lifetime. Afield that in A.D. 1914-18 had been scored by
trenches and pitted with shell-holes had been ploughed up by bull-
dozers and effaced by bomb-craters in A.D. 1939-45. An Oikoumenti that
in August 1914 had been under cultivation as a chequer-board of
national allotments had now become a waste-land open to a unitary
occupation. For a post-Hitlerian empire-builder, Hitler's derelict legacy
was a gift of the Gods.

1 Rauschning, H.: Germany's Revolution of Destruction. English translation (London
1930, Heinemann).
* See V. vt 186-7.