TECHNOLOGY, WAR, AND GOVERNMENT 509

vision for the defence of their Reductions against marauding Mamelucos
from Brazil;1 and, after the break-up of the Spanish Empire of the Indies
into a score of mutually hostile successor-states, the forgotten wars
which the Guaranfs had fought in the seventeenth century as soldiers of
the Society of Jesus, and in an earlier age as barbarian invaders of an
Andean Empire of the Four Quarters, had been refought in the nine-
teenth century in Paraguay's deadly single-handed war of A.D. 1864-70
against the combined forces of Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina, and in
the twentieth century in her duel with Bolivia in A.D. 1930—35 for posses-
sion of the Gran Chaco. In Mexico, again, since the revolution in A.D.
1910 against an oligarchy of Creole Spanish and other alien origin, the
descendants of once martial Toltecs and Chichimecs had exercised them-
selves, like a previously non-militant Chinese peasantry since the revo-
lution in A.D. 1911 against a Manchu 'ascendancy', in chronic civil wars
which had been 'undecisive', though unfortunately not 'temperate', con-
tests.

This widespread militarization of a hitherto primitive and, for the
most part, pacific peasantry, that, mid-way through the twentieth cen-
tury of the Christian Era, still accounted for some three-quarters of the
living generation of Mankind, was an event that could hardly fail, in the
long run, to have some decisive effect on the destinies of a Westernizing
World. Its most impressive feature was one that was manifestly preg-
nant with alternative possibilities, good and evil. In almost every case,
these hitherto unmilitary peasants had no sooner been drilled and armed
according to the latest Western fashion than they had astonished the
World by defeating, and this with ease, old-fashioned warriors of the
traditional type who had hitherto taken it for granted that the peasants
were of no military account.

The Egyptian fallahm, who had been subjugated, oppressed, exploited,
and despised by an interminable series of martial alien conquerors,
proved their mettle by breaking the resistance of the Moreots, in those
wild highlanders' native mountain lairs, in A.D. 1825, only one year after
Mehmed (Ali had begun to draft the fallahm in any appreciable numbers
into his new-model army,z and some two thousand years after they had
given their latest previous proof of a capacity to make good soldiers
when, in the service of another Macedonian master of their country,
Egyptian peasant phalangites had defeated Greek peasant phalangites in
pitched battle at Raphia in 217 B.C.3 This twice-performed achievement
of the peasantry of Egypt had been capped by the peasantry of Japan
when in A.D. 1877, only four years after the implementation in A.D. 1873*
of the conscription law of A.D. 1870,5 they had put down an insurrection
of a dissident faction of the samurai of the self-assertive fief of Satsuma6
against a Meiji regime that had been inaugurated in A.D, 1868-9.

The prowess of these Japanese peasant conscript soldiers in this early
ordeal is the more noteworthy considering that, in AJX 1873, they had

* See O'Neill, S.J., George: Golden Years on the Paraguay: A History of the Jeswt
Missions from 1600 to 1767 (London 1034, Burns Gates), pp. 80-^91.

2 See IX. viil. 343, n, 4. 3 See V. v. 68, with n. i.

+ See Sansora, G. B.: The Western World and Japan (London 1950, Cresset Press),
p. 34z. 5 See ibid., pp. 339 and 342- e See ibid-> PP- 347-5°.