Page:The Hero in History.djvu/102

102 setting a limit to its duration, and the strike will fail. Let a democratic organization make a united front with a disciplined totalitarian organization that agitates for its own programme, and the democratic body will either become a catspaw for purposes foreign to its democratic aims or meet organizational disaster.

Of course every situation will to some extent be different. That is what we mean when we say we can distinguish between two situations. We can go beyond this tautology. We can admit the contingent and unforeseen, eruptions from outside into the pattern of expectation, almost invariably crop up. But it will not do to count upon them to stave off a disaster that can be spelled out from what we have previously done. We can be sure that something will always turn up, but not always in the right place. What is truly unique about the contingent and unforeseen is that it always can be anticipated but never relied upon.

That the variations in contingent historical effects by certain “laws” of historical behaviour is recognized at every hand in the body of the work which the cited passage mtroduces. In fact I am acquainted with few historical accounts that are studded with so many laws and generahzations—some of quite questionable validity—about the limits with which the contingent and unforeseen are to be found. We introduce them as illusttations, not because we accept them as true, but to show that Mr. Fisher must believe them to be true, or something like them to be true, in order to compose an intelligible story.

In speaking of the periodic raids of the early Greek settlers, he tells us: “The quest of supplies by war or plunder was a necessary supplement to the tillage and pasturage of the community. It was not so much a crime as a part of state economy. Man must eat to live. If crops run short, he must steal, fight, or emigrate.” Of the course of Roman expansion, he writes: “The successive stages of her conquest of Italy were forced upon her because, as England afterwards experienced in India, an orderly power ringed round by turbulence always finds itself compelled to establish peace and security upon its frontiers.” And of the effect of this expansion, in its later phases, on Roman character he adds: “The vast plunder of Africa and Asia, of Macedonia and Greece, produced upon the Roman character the evil effects which suddenly acquired wealth always exerts upon minds unprepared to receive it.”

Mr. Fisher is not a historical materialist or an economic