TECHNOLOGY, WAR, AND GOVERNMENT 537

lem of bringing the whole of the OikoumenS under the undivided control
of a single oecumenical government.

In terms of facilities for human intercourse no point in the Oikoumeng
was so remote from Washington in A.D. 1952 as Georgia and New Hamp-
shire had been when, in A.D. 1792,J the Congress of the United States
had provided for a four months' delay in the inauguration of a President
after the election of his electors, in order to give the successful candidate
the time that he would need for winding up his affairs at home and
making his way to the seat of the Federal Government on horseback.
For purposes of human intercourse the United States at the time of its
establishment was of about the same size as the Achaemenian Empire in
the fifth century B.C., when it took three months to travel to Susa, the
imperial capital, from Ephesus, the Aegean terminus of the Great North-
West Imperial Highway;2 and the Roman Empire may be reckoned
to have been of about the same size in human terms, if we may assume
that the centurion who took charge of Saint Paul after the Apostle had
appealed to Caesar would not have taken more than three months in
conveying his prisoner from the Palestinian port of Caesarea to the
Italian port of Puteoli if he had been able to book a direct passage and
if he had been less unlucky in his weather.3 In A.D. 1952 three months
seemed an inordinate length of time to allow for any journey imaginable.
Yet the Roman Empire, the Achaemenian Empire, and the United
States in her pre-railroad age were effectively administered common-
wealths, though in each of them a period of three months had to be

" al; and, in
, Constan-

tine, and Napoleon were able repeatedly to confound their antagonists
by the speed at which they managed to dart from one extremity to
another of an Oikoumen$ whose radius, in human terms, was a three
months' journey for ordinary official travellers, and a proportionately
longer time than that for anyone not entitled to travel by the public post.

While in point of conductivity an eighteenth-century United States
had been a polity of the same order of magnitude as the Roman or the
Achaemenian Empire, in point of constitution it bad been more ambi-
tious. In contrast to the Roman and Achaemenian imperial regimes,
which had been content to impose upon their subjects an authoritarian
government maintained by a professional army and administered by a
professional civil service responsible to an individual autocrat, the Con-
stitution of the United States had provided for democratic government
in a polity of the Roman or Achaemenian size by combining the Medieval
Western device of parliamentary representation of an electorate with the

1 In an Act approved on the ist March, 1792, the Congress of the United States laid
down that the members of the Electoral College, provided in the Constitution (Art. II,
§ i, par. a) for electing the President, should themselves be elected on the Tuesday
following the first Monday in the November of a presidential election year, and that the
term of office of the President elected by the Electoral College should run from 'the
fourth day of March next succeeding' the date of election. The initial date of the Presi-
dent's term of office was e ventuallyladvanced from the 4th March to the 2Oth January by the
Twentieth Amendment to the Constitution, which was proclaimed on the 6th February,
1933—a date by which the United States had moved out of the Horse Age through the
Railroad Age into the Air Age.

z See VI. vii. 8a, n. i. 3 See Acts xxvii. i-xxvm. 16.

allowed for making the journey from the frontier to the capital; i
this pre-railroad age, a Darius, Alexander, Demetrius, Caesar, Co