XII. B (ii) ANNEX

A CRITIQUE OF GIBBON'S GENERAL OBSER-
VATIONS ON THE FALL OF THE ROMAN
EMPIRE IN THE WEST

IN the chapter to which this annex attaches, three passages of this analy-
tical parenthesis in Gibbon's narrative have been quoted as classical
expressions of an eighteenth-century Western spirit of complacency.1
Gibbon's analysis, however, throws light, not only on the outlook of a
cultivated minority in the Western World of his day, but also on the
prospects of his generation's and his society's successors mid-way
through the twentieth century, after the lapse of some 170 years or more
since the date—some time between A.D. 1772 and A.D. i78i2—when
Gibbon's 'General Observations' were drafted. The last six of the ten
paragraphs of which these observations consist are devoted to a com-
parison, point by point, between the state of the Hellenic Society at the
time of the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, in the fifth century of
the Christian Era, and the state of the Western Society at the time when
Gibbon was writing—which was during the lull between the close of the
Seven Years War in A.D. 1763 and the outbreak of the Revolutionary and
Napoleonic Wars in A.D. 1792. The points that Gibbon brings up as
topics for comparison are so well chosen, and his estimates, point by
point, of the Western Civilization's prospects in his day are so illumi-
nating for any mind attempting to make corresponding estimates five or
six generations later,3 that, in the present Annex to a Part of this Study
dealing with the prospects of the Western Civilization in the twentieth
century, the writer has reprinted the synoptic paragraphs of Gibbon's
observations with a twentieth-century commentary on each of them, in
the belief that he could have found no more effective way of prosecuting
his own inquiry.

The fifth paragraph of Gibbon's observations, which opens with a
passage quoted already in the main body of the present Part,4 may now
be reprinted in full.

'This awful revolution may be usefully applied to the instruction of the
present age. It is the duty of a patriot to prefer and promote the exclusive
interest and glory of his native country: but a philosopher may be per-
mitted to enlarge his views, and to consider Europe as one great republic,
whose various inhabitants have attained almost the same level of politeness
and cultivation. The Balance of Power will continue to fluctuate, and the
prosperity of our own or the neighbouring kingdoms may be alternately
exalted or depressed; but these partial events cannot essentially injure our
general state of happiness, the system of arts, and laws, and manners,

1 See pp. 424 and 425, above.

2 See IV. iv. 148, n. 3,

3 The original notes for the present Annex -were drafted, not in A.D. 1050, but in
A.D. 1929.

* On p. 4*4, above.