TECHNOLOGY, WAR, AND GOVERNMENT 555
future political unification of the Oikoumeng under the control of some
unitary political authority; and the first concern of the living generation
of Mankind was that this perilous transit should be accomplished without
a third world war.

In an age of atomic warfare there were no peoples for whom this was
not a matter of life and death in a world whose unification was already
an accomplished fact on the military plane, but there were three peoples
that had also incurred a special measure of moral responsibility for
seeing to it that an urgently needed world order should be established
without another catastrophe. In bringing about, between them, the
defeat of Germany in the World War of A.D. 1939-45, the peoples of
Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States had taken it upon
themselves on behalf of Mankind to reject Hitler's offer of a lasting
peace at Hitler's price. If in A.D. 1940-1 Hitler had been allowed by these
three Powers to have his way, peace would have been imposed on the
World by the establishment of a Pax Germanica that would have relieved
Mankind from the fear of another world war for as far ahead into the
future as any human eye could see. Hitler's price for this boon had been
so exorbitant that the three victor Powers' decision to reject his offer
was likely to win for them the blessings of Posterity supposing that they
were now to succeed, between them, in bestowing the same boon on
Mankind at an appreciably lower cost in the coin of standardization,
regimentation, injustice, and tyranny. On the other hand, these same
victors over Hitler would bring down upon their own heads Posterity's
curses if they were to allow a third world war to rankle out of their vic-
tory. In denying to Mankind the opportunity of enjoying the substantial
benefits of an odious Pax Germanica, the peoples of the United States,
the Soviet Union, and Great Britain had taken upon themselves a bind-
ing moral obligation to provide Mankind with a better world order than
Hitler's without inflicting on Mankind the third world war that a Ger-
man victory would have spared them.

Should the ex-victors now fail to accomplish this self-imposed task,
they must expect to share with the Germans the execrations of an
intolerably tormented Mankind so long as any memory survived of Man-
kind's history in the twentieth century of the Christian Era. On the
other hand, if, between them, they were to succeed in piloting Noah's
Ark intact into the still waters of the lagoon beyond the perilous reef,
they could look forward to being remembered throughout the rest of the
Human Race's term of life on Earth as the heroes who, by an un-
precedented moral triumph over the perversity of their own human
nature, had closed a chapter of human history branded with the ghastly
mark of Cain1 as the abominable Age of Civilization, Human Sacrifice,
Slavery, and War, and had opened the way for Mankind to acquit itself
better than before in its perennial struggle with an innate Original Sin.
A generation which, in A.D. 1952, was thus bound over to render a strict
account of a morally onerous stewardship might take heart from the
words of an Athenian philosopher who had witnessed the breakdown of
the Hellenic Civilization.

1 Gen. iv. 15, 17, and 22.