TECHNOLOGY, WAR, AND GOVERNMENT^ 505 :

Europe far more cruelly than the War of A.D. 1914-18, it was^dent ,*
that this cradle of the Western Civilization had indeed been overtafescjby x * •" f s
the fate that, on the morrow of the First World War, Paul Valerynacr'~'r"**
still been hoping against hope to see her succeed in keeping at bay. The
knack of using the products and copying the procedures of a West
European technology had by now been effectively acquired by other
inhabitants of an Oikoumeng which had been unified by a secular move-
ment of West European aggression; and, on the fringes of a world of
which Western Europe had been the heart, a successfully propagated
West European technique could command the brute force of an area of
territory, a volume of non-human natural resources, and a head of popu-
lation that this technique had never had, and would never have, at its
disposal in the hands of its West European originators.

What use were Western Europe's pupils going to make of the power
which their painful education had now placed in their hands? The wave
of militarization, whose course since A.D. 1494 we have already traced
within the narrow limits of Western Europe, had not come to rest at an
expanding Western World's original boundaries or slackened the pace of
its advance because the native Western peoples who had first set it travel-
ling were now becoming war-weary as a consequence of having con-
tinued to indulge in recurrent bouts of warfare for more than four and a
half centuries. Since the close of the seventeenth century of the Christian
Era this ever advancing wave of militarization on Western lines had en-
gulfed one after another of the once autonomous non-Western societies
that had been drawn successively into an expanding Western Civiliza-
tion's ambit; and in each case the introduction of this alien Western
institutional process had had the same consequence as it had been
having in the West since the opening of the overture to the current
Western series of war-and-peace cycles. In the Western World at the
turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries of the Christian Era, the
West European peasantry, with a few small local exceptions, had, as we
have seen,1 been strangers to the bearing of arms, and War had been the
business of either a foreign mercenary infantry and light horse or a native
feudal heavy cavalry; but we have also seen2 that, since the General War
of A.D. 1494-1525, there had been a sustained series of moves in all mili-
tant Western states to substitute native troops for foreign troops in all
arms, conscripts for volunteers, and a universal compulsory service im-
posed on the whole population, without distinction between classes, for
an earlier selective compulsory service in which the peasantry had been
made to bear the brunt'of the burden. These effects of modern militari-
zation in the Western World itself were reproduced when the wave of
militarization on Western lines spread to the once autonomous societies
that were being swept into a Western net.

In these originally non-Western societies, as in the Western World
itself in the past, the peasantry had as a rule been non-militant. The
principal public service that had been required of them by their rulers
had been to provide, out of their production of food and fibres, for the
feeding and clothing of relatively small fighting forces consisting of

1 On pp. 491-2, above. 2 On pp. 4Q2-4, above.