556 PROSPECTS OF THE WESTERN CIVILIZATION

'In the struggle that will decide whether good or evil is to prevail in us,
the issue is immeasurably greater than at first sight it might seem to be.
. . . We must do everything that lies in our power to attain to Virtue and
Wisdom in This Life. The prize is so splendid and the hope is so great.'1

(V) PROBABLE FUNCTIONS OF A FUTURE
WORLD ORDER

Supposing that a world government were to be established, what
would its functions be ? Presumably these functions would be much the
same whether the establishment of this prospective world government
were to be achieved pacifically or at the cost of a third world war, and
whether it were to remain fixed in its initial form of a domination or
hegemony exercised by a paramount Power or were eventually to acquire
a federal constitution in which all the people in a supra-national common-
wealth might hope to receive something like their fair share in the con-
duct of common affairs. Evidently the choice between these divers
alternative roads might make a world of difference to the possibility of
a world government's being able to perform its functions satisfactorily,
whatever these functions might be; but the functions themselves would
presumably have been determined in advance by the play of those
historical forces that, in A.D. 1952, seemed to be making the establish-
ment of some kind of world government, at some price, inevitable. Was
the nature of these future functions then perhaps already discernible ?

A world government would be the government of a universal state;
and the specific characteristics of universal states, as well as the generic
characteristics of states of all the divers historic species, were revealed
in the history of Man in Process of Civilization within the last five or
six thousand years.

A state was an institution in which part of the psychic power-charge
of an individual human being was impounded and combined with parts
of the power-charges of other men and women to constitute a pool of
power at the disposal of persons controlling and operating a govern-
ment. A state might be defined as a piece of social mechanism designed
for the twin purposes of accumulating power and of applying it; and the
preservation of the power of a state was consequently bound to be the
first concern of the persons, .whoever these might be, who had one of
these political pools of power at their command. The most dangerous
threat to the survival of any parochial state had always been the existence
of other parochial states within striking distance of it, and therefore the
most urgent business of any parochial sovereign government had been
to maintain its own power against encroachments on the part of other
parochial governments in the same politico-military arena and, if pos-
sible, also to increase its own power at the expense of each and all of its
neighbours. At the same time, every parochial government had always
had to fight for the preservation of its power on a domestic front as well
as on a foreign front, since, even when it was not being threatened by

1 Plato: Respvbtica, 608 B, and Phaedo, 114 c, quoted in V. vi. 168.