TECHNOLOGY, WAR, AND GOVERNMENT 553
the United States' overwhelming preponderance over the rest of the
Western World in economic productivity. On the other side, West
European satellites of the United States might be reluctant, for their
part, to sacrifice a shadow of sovereignty that they still retained in a
dependent relation which actually left them at the United States' mercy;
and, for the sake of clinging to this shadow, they might refrain from
making any attempt to win the substance of an equitable share in the
joint conduct of common affairs which could be obtained only at the
price of pooling, in a federal union with the United States, a sovereignty
which, in this form, could be revalidated within limits corresponding to
current political and economic realities.

The mulish perversity of Human Nature that thus threatened to assert
itself on both sides, if and when a proposal for federation was brought
forward, was an obstacle that could not be expected to yield easily or
quickly to common sense and goodwill; yet there were historical pre-
cedents which indicated that, in any commonwealth of nations that had
originated in the establishment of one dominant Power's paramountcy
over a cluster of satellites, the passage of time would be likely to bring
with it a gradual approach towards political equality through the pro-
gressive enfranchisement of the imperial people's former subjects or
subordinates.1

In the history of a Roman Commonwealth whose arcanum imperil had
been its liberality in conferring the Roman citizenship upon aliens who
had fallen under Rome's rule or hegemony, successive narrow-hearted
reactions against this characteristic manifestation of a Roman political
genius had all, in turn, been successively transcended sooner or later.
Between 338 B.C. and 241 B.C. the inhabitants of about one quarter of
Cisappennine Italy, extending along the south-west coast as far down as
Cumae, and along the north-east coast as far up as Pesaro, had been
progressively incorporated into the Roman citizen body, and this politic
generosity had enabled Rome to establish her dominion over the whole
peninsula. The door that had thus been held open for a century had
then been closed and had been kept bolted and barred thereafter for the
next 150 years; but in 90-89 B.C. the rest of Rome's Italian satellites had
extorted the Roman franchise from the paramount Power by force of
arms; and, when, after this tardy further step forward, the reactionaries
had brought the process of enfranchisement to a halt again, this time
along the line of the River Po, the door had been broken open by Caesar
and had never been closed again. Caesar's enfranchisement of Rome's
Transpadane satellites in 49 B.C. restarted a process which this time
never came completely to a halt till in A.D. 212 it reached its term in
Caracalla's enfranchisement of virtually all the residue of Rome's then
still unenfranchised subjects throughout an empire that embraced all
but a fragment of the Hellenic World; and the readiness of the Roman
citizen body at this stage to share its political privileges with the rest of
the inhabitants of an Hellenic Oikoumen£that had been united politically
under Rome's aegis seems to have been matched by a readiness on the
part even of ancient and famous non-Roman Hellenic communities now
1 See, for example, VI. vii. 146-58.

B 2915 JX T 2,