Authority continued to be exercised from the imperial nucleus.
The newly conquered territories were policed by professional soldiers
whose primary loyalty was national but whose responsibility was to the
aggregate composing the Roman or the Egyptian civilization.
The acid test of the expanding civilization was embodied in the degree
of acceptance of wholeness as opposed to self-determination. Were the
individual members--the provinces and colonies composing the
whole--willing and able to sink their differences in an unquestioned
wholeness, or were they prepared at the first opportunity to exercise
their right to self-determination and declare their independence of the
whole?
The resolution of this question constituted the sixth collective goal of
civilization: to establish a whole in which the component members were
able and willing to recognize the axiom that the interests of the whole
come before the interests of any of its component parts.
The issue of central authority versus local self determination has been
one of the basic issues of the present century because during the
preceding period, the British, French, Dutch and Spanish Empires had
been built up by the conquest and occupation of foreign lands. If the
nineteenth century was an epoch of expanding imperial authority, the
twentieth century has been an epoch of the dismemberment of empires by
movements for independence and self-determination.
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