hat war has been a "proximate
cause" of the overthrow of one civilization after another. No observer
of current western civilization can fail to note the determining part
played by war during the first half of the present century.

Every completed civilization known to historians has passed through a
sociological life cycle: origin, growth, expansion, maturity, violent
premature dismemberment and death in the competitive survival struggle
or gradual decline and eventual dissolution.

Every completed civilization has had small, local beginnings, on an
island like Crete, or a group of islands like the Japanese Archipelago,
or a tiny spot like Latium on the Tiber River, or an isolated area like
the desert-surrounded Nile River Valley in Africa. The seed ground or
nucleus of each civilization has been a small, well-knit group of
vigorous, energetic people, well-led, living in an easily defended,
limited area, enjoying relative isolation, but also having ready access
to the outside world.

At the beginning the growth cycle has moved slowly, from victory to
victory, as competing neighboring peoples have been brought under the
authority of the victor in local wars. After generations or centuries of
struggle a point is reached at which the nucleus of the growing empire
begins to expand, through trade, colonization, diplomatic alliances,
conquest, into an era of survival struggle in which rival cities reach
out for the same piece of fertile land, the same markets, the same
mineral deposits. Again the life and death survival struggle tests out
the people, their leaders, their ambitions, determination, tenacity.

Earlier struggles were local. Now the struggle area has become regional.
At the outset the peoples were amateurs in the science and art of
expansion, occupation, consolidation, exploitation. Through the hard
school of struggle they became professionals. From victory to victory
they gained in territory, in wealth, in administrative skill. One by
one, rivals were eliminated, annexed or associated with the nascent
empire which was by way of becoming the central empire of a maturing
civilization.

Generations of effort and centuries of time have gone into the empire
building process. The farther the civilization has expanded, the greater
the necessary input of manpower, wealth, enterprise and administrative
talent needed to keep the enterprise strong, solvent, masterful.

Eventually the expanding civilization reaches a