596
PARTISAN REVIEW
The emperor's will, more often than not, went out of control
at his and later her human realization of such power: this has been
named
The Imperial Madness.
Corruption in judgement was propor–
tionate to the extent of imperial power.
The
Pax Romana
functioned off and on for perhaps two hundred
years. The
Pax Britannica
a hundred. They are separated by seven–
teen hundred years of no stable peace in the West at all.
Peace historically has followed on the will of the dominant power.
In the modern world, historical precedent may not matter. Henry
Adams said that history
broke
in the year 1900, and it is conceivable
that in any number of still approximately inconceivable ways he was
right.
The
Pax Britannica
was effective and often in certain ways benefi–
cent but no body of people ever opted for it at the expense of their
own independence however bloody and poor that independence was
or might prove to be in the future . I have no idea
what
we are supposed
to make of that except that I suppose peace didn't seem beneficent to
those who experienced it as imposed and, therefore, as conferring an
inferiority, a tribal reservation sort of thing on them.
It was not a world peace. In Europe, there were wars carried out
by the Prussians, and there was internal fighting in Italy, and exter–
nal and internal fighting in Austro-Hungary; there was a Serbian
uprising supported by Russia against the Turks; and there was the
Crimean War; and we had our Civil War which was the world's larg–
est war, or the largest in modern history until then. We preferred the
murders of the war to British mediation which would have almost
certainly supported slavery. Still, those European wars and our Civil
Wars and the wars I have not mentioned from that period became
world conflicts in the hundred years the British oversaw peace be–
tween the time of Waterloo and the fall of Napoleon in 1815 and the
outbreak of World War I in 1914 and the eruption of the immense
butcheries in our century.
We have not chosen as a nation to establish a
Pax Americana;
or
if we have, it is a very halting form of it defined as halting the spread,
country by country, of communist governments; recently, Reagan
added a clause stating our distaste for right-wing despots as well which
indicates some progress ideologically on the part of the American
polity; but in real time refers only to our not giving our client despots
support for their regimes in their internal affairs. Until now, our
