5io PROSPECTS OF THE WESTERN CIVILIZATION
shown a distinct reluctance and apprehension1 upon their receipt of the
summons to take up a military calling from which they had been jealously
excluded for at least a thousand years past, and considering further that,
in the event, the first enemy whom they had been called upon to face in
the field had been a war-band of those indigenous Japanese feudal war-
riors whom the Japanese peasant had been taught sedulously, throughout
those last thousand years, to revere as his legitimate and invincible lords
and masters. Even the parvenu element in a British Indian Army had
had time, before the transfer of the raj in A.D. 1947, to demonstrate, by
gallant conduct in the General War of A.D. 1939-45, that it, too, had
military virtue in it which, through the long age of inhibition, had been
awaiting, undamped, the first opportunity to declare itself. For example,
a Bihar Regiment, raised in A.D. 1941—2,2 and a Madras Regiment, re-
formed in A.D. 1942, both distinguished themselves on the Burma front
in warfare that was perhaps the severest ordeal to which any troops
engaged in this Second World War were subjected in any theatre of
operations.

The beneficial consequence of the peasant conscript's prompt and con-
clusive success in proving himself in action to be the traditional privi-
leged warrior's military peer was the gain won by each of these military
demonstrations for the civil cause of social justice. One of the conspicuous
moral shortcomings of Civilization during the first five or six thousand
years of its currency had been its endowment of a small minority with
material and spiritual treasures at the expense of a large majority whose
own share in the fruits of the whole body social's co-operative labours
had been as inequitably inadequate as the minority's share had been
inequitably excessive.3 This moral flaw had reappeared in the histories
of all the civilizations that had risen and fallen since the breakdown of
the Egyptiac Civilization in the Age of the Pyramid-Builders ;4 so long as
the flaw was allowed to persist, the institution of Civilization would re-
main morally unsound; and, in an aeon in which Mankind in Process of
Civilization had not yet succeeded in extricating itself from the practice
of War, it would perhaps have been too much to hope that a miser a plebs
contribnens should succeed in securing a long-since overdue modicum of
social justice without having first vindicated its claim in an ordeal by
battle. Nevertheless, it could be argued in A.D. 1952, on the evidence of
disconcerting events, that militarization had by then already proved in
practice to have been too high a price to pay for an approach towards
egalitarianism. The course of Japanese history since A.D. 1877 aptly illus-
trated this point; for, while, on the one hand, the Japanese conscript
peasant army instituted in the Meiji Era had proved to be the one effec-
tive institution for securing a minimum of social justice for a still con-
spicuously depressed majority in a Japanese Society that had continued,

1 See Sansom, op. cit.? p. 411.

* The First Bihar Regiment came into existence on the isth September, 1941, when
the Eleventh Battalion of the Nineteenth Hyderabad Regiment was converted into a
regular battalion and redesignated. This was the first time that aboriginals were recruited
into the Indian Army. The Second Battalion of the Bihar Regiment was raised on the
ist December, 1942, at Agra. Fifty per cent, of its recruits were from the aboriginal
forest hill tribes of Chota Nagpur.

3 See pp. 489, above, and p. 561, below. 4 See I. i. 141-2.