58o PROSPECTS OF THE WESTERN CIVILIZATION
coalescence and shrinkage of the Oikoumene in the twentieth century
as a result of a latter-day Western technological revolution1 had put an
end, even on the physical plane, to an isolation which, on that plane,
had in truth been achieved partially and temporarily by West European
settlers in North America whose boasted insularity had never, on the
spiritual plane, been anything but a pure illusion.

The issue between an ideal of American insularity and an ideal of
oecumenical human solidarity had been the most important issue in the
history of the United States, and this was both a moral issue and a
practical one. Was it possible to insulate the United States from the
rest of the Oikoumene^ And, if it was possible, was it also right for
Americans to make this one of the aims of their national policy ?

The possibility of isolating the United States from the Old World
had been open to question long before the Old World had closed in
upon America on the physical plane as a consequence of twentieth-
century Western Man's technological feat of 'annihilating distance'.
The novel amplitude of the opportunity in the United States for rising
in the social scale had, for example, been created by a stream of im-
migration from the Old World which had flowed, and this in an ever-
increasing volume, for nearly a hundred years ending in A.D. 1914. Each
annual influx of immigrants, as it poured into the sump of the American
melting-pot, had buoyed up all the layers of immigrant population that
had preceded it, and each of the annual contingents had been able to
count upon being buoyed up, in its turn, by all the future annual
influxes that were to follow. In the nineteenth century an American
family's rise in the social scale had thus been almost automatic at every
level in the structure of a social pyramid that was being jacked up and
underpinned by the importation of a fresh layer of immigrant popula-
tion year by year; and the same reservoir of population in the Old
World that had ensured this rise by feeding an inflowing stream of
immigration into the United States had also ensured a livelihood for
the increasing population of the United States by providing a market
for the increasing abundance of commodities that these new hands in a
New World were producing through the exploitation of hitherto untapped
American natural resources.

Thus, on the economic plane, the New World in North America had
still been part and parcel of the Old World east of the Atlantic in the
nineteenth century, even more conspicuously than in the eighteenth
and the seventeenth. In the nineteenth century the United States had
developed her new estate by importing man-power and capital from the
Old World's surplus stores and exporting resultant American products
to the Old World's markets; and, though successive approximations
towards the achievement of North America's economic independence
had been marked by the raising of the height of the United States'
tariff wall during and after the Civil War and by the cutting down of
the volume of immigration into the United States after the First World
War, this approach towards autarky on the economic plane had been
ofiset on the political plane by an increasing entanglement in inter-

* See pp. 479-90, above.