TECHNOLOGY, WAR, AND GOVERNMENT 515
This twenty-three-years-old intimation of mortality was still pertinent
in A.D. 1952, since by that date the ever accelerating shrinkage in the
scale of the Oikoumen^ as measured in terms of human means of com-
munication, had reduced the effective size of the Island of North America
to about that of the British Isles or the Japanese Archipelago twenty-
three years back. Yet, in catching in A.D. 1929 this glimpse of the irony
in the destiny of an ephemeral Japanese rule in Korea, the observer had
failed to penetrate to the inwardness of the tragedy in the destiny of
Japan's Korean subjects. What he had seen had reminded him. of the
social insects, but he had failed to apprehend the meaning of this cue.
He had failed to recollect that the inhuman or superhuman discipline to
which the social insects had subjected themselves had enabled them to
cultivate a super-Spartan Militarism;1 that a discipline which had been
the matrix of Militarism had been the fruit of habits of docility, industry,
and endurance; that/for the inculcation of these ant-like or bee-like
mores in the Human Psyche, the best school in the World had been the
life and labour of a primitive peasantry working at a standard of living
just above starvation-level; and that it was no accident that Frederick II's
Prussian Janissaries, like Mehmed II's Ottoman Imperial Slave-House-
hold before them, had been recruited from a subject peasantry and not
from the wilful and wayward scions of a traditional privileged warrior
class.

The traditional submissiveness of the peoples of Asia had, since time
immemorial, taken the political form of passive obedience to arbitrary
governments, and the cultural process of Westernization would have to
go far beyond the rudimentary accomplishment of acquiring a Western
military technique before the Asian peasant-soldier would begin to
think of questioning, or, a fortiori, defying, orders from above to sacrifice
his life even in an aggressive war that meant nothing to him personally.
On the other hand the citizens of West European states who were
accustomed to exercise at least some measure of control over their govern-
ments, through parliaments composed of their own elected representa-
tives, would be apt to display their novel unwarlikeness in compelling
their governments to submit, Vichy fashion, to a foreign aggressor rather
than go to war for the traditional object of preserving their countries*
sovereign independence at a cost in life, property, and welfare which the
West European peoples might now no longer have the will to pay.

How far could mid-twentieth-century Asian governments go in ex-
ploiting their subjects' ingrained submissiveness for military purposes ?
On the evidence of recent history, they could go less far in a war of
aggression abroad than in a defensive war fought on their own soil; yet
History had demonstrated that they could make their peasant armies
obey, however reluctantly, the order to march into battle even in a
foreign campaign for which they had no heart. What were the limits of
the Asian peasant-soldier's endurance in honouring his rulers' demands
upon his self-sacrificing submissiveness ? In Western eyes it might look
as if the Chinese or Russian peasant-soldier had given his government a
blank cheque drawn on his life; yet History had demonstrated that there
i See III. EL 88-1 ii.