750 PROSPECTS OF THE WESTERN CIVILIZATION
Gibbon's principal theme in this paragraph is the military effect of 'tem-
perate and undecisive contests' between Western parochial states in
exercising them for the common military task of meeting 'the Yellow
Peril', if the Nomads should ever again break westwards out of the
Great Eurasian Steppe. In the improbable event of these hypothetical
aggressors from the heartland of the Old World overcoming the resis-
tance of each and all of the mutually independent sedentary peoples
living between the European shore of the Steppe and the Atlantic coast
of Europe, Gibbon imagines 'the remains of Civilised Society' seeking
and finding asylum in an America which by his time had already become
a second home of the Western Civilization.

By Gibbon's time a series of waves of refugees, as well as conquista-
doresy from Western Europe had, in truth, already broken on the coasts
of a New World where these der acmes had found themselves able to strike
fresh root, and this stream of Transatlantic migration was to flow on, in
greater volume and at a faster pace, for another 140 years after the date
at which Gibbon was writing. But neither the Pilgrim Fathers nor 'the
Forty-Eighters' were victims of 'the Tartar hordes'; and, if in A.D. 1952
*the remains of Civilised Society' on the European Peninsula of Asia
were hoping once again—and this for the third time in one lifetime—
that America was going to play the part of arsenal and citadel of Demo-
cracy on behalf of European peoples 'who perhaps might confederate
for their common defence', this was not because the European homeland
of the Western Civilization was having to face the prospect of another
Nomad attack. This once perennial peril had never loomed up again
since A.D. 1237-41, when the dreaded advance of Batu Khan's expedi-
tionary force had moved the herring-fishermen of Friesland and Goth-
land to stay ashore, mounting guard over their homes and families, while
the whole season's catch of the year 1238 glutted the market in a snugly
insular England.1 In the general wars of A.D. 1914-18 and 1939-45 the
aggressors whose ambitions had been frustrated by the intervention of
the United States had been, not Nomad Mongols, but urban Germans;
and, though in December 1950 Mongol cavalry were operating in Korea
as auxiliaries of an intervening Chinese Communist army, it was not the
Mongols, but the Russians, who were playing the aggressor's part in this
fateful year. Thus a persisting partition of the Western World among a
litter of warring parochial states, in which Gibbon had seen a salutary
insurance against the chimaerical danger of a resurgence of the Nomads,
had actually opened the way for a betrayal of the West European sanc-
tuary of Western culture to an enemy within the gates. In Gibbon's order
of battle against a Nomad offensive, 'the robust peasants of Russia* are
posted in the first line of the defending forces, and 'the numerous armies
of Germany' in the second. How will a historian-strategist fare when

* 'Unde Gothiam et Frisiam inhabitantes, Impetus eorum pertimentes, in Angliam,
Ut moris est eorum, apud Gernemue [Yarmouth], tempore allecis capiendi, quo suas
naves solebant onerare, non venerunt. Hinc erat quod allec eo anno in AngHS quasi pro
nihilo prae abundantii. habitum, sub quadragenario vel quinquagenario numero, licet
optimum esset, pro uno argento in partibus a man etiam longinquis vendebantur'
(Matthew Paris: Chrordca Maiora, sub anno A,D. 1238, in H. R. Luard's edition, vol. iii
(London 1876, Longman, Trttbner, Parkes, Macmillan, Black, & Thorn), p. 488).