Hence civilization will always be at risk, and every age is prudent to regard the threats to it with unique seriousness

From Enemies of Society by Paul Johnson.

On the last day of 1911, Wilfred Scawen Blunt, the poet and propagandist for the subject peoples - the first of the modern anti-colonialists - made a despondent entry in his diary:

Today a sad year ends, the worst politically I can remember since the 1880s, bloodshed, massacre and destruction everywhere, and all accepted in England with a cynical approval, our Foreign Office being accomplice with the evil-doers, and Grey [Foreign Secretary] their apologist. It has been a losing battle in which I have fought long and hard, but with no result of good. I am old, and weary, and discouraged, and would if I could slink out of the fight. I am useless in the face of an entirely hostile world.

At the end of the 1970s, virtually everything that Blunt campaigned for, in what he then thought a hopeless struggle, has been triumphantly accomplished. The British empire he hated, which he regarded as an evil conspiracy against the weak and innocent coloured peoples of the world, is now 'at one with Nineveh and Tyre'. Africa has been unscrambled, Asia 'liberated', sovereignty awarded to more than a hundred nations which, in Blunt's day, were administered by European officials. The world he knew and deplored had been erased from the map, in the greatest transfer of power in human history; and almost all the dominant values and assumptions of 1911 have been cast aside or inverted. The 'hostile world' has dissolved as if it had never been, and Blunt's views have become the prevailing wisdom of our planet.

Yet it is difficult to argue that civilization is any richer, or more secure, than it was then. 'Bloodshed, massacre, and destruction everywhere': the phrase applies as well, or better, to our times, as to his. New tyrannies have replaced old ones, and fresh injustices have been generously heaped on the heads of countless innocents in every quarter of the earth. Few sensitive souls can look around the world today with feelings of satisfaction, or optimism. This is not to say that the revolution through which we have passed could and should have been prevented; on the contrary, it was both just and inevitable. But the events of this century should remind us that the hopes of mankind almost always prove illusory, and that we have only a limited ability to devise permanent and equitable solutions to problems which spring from human nature. Violence, shortage amid plenty, tyranny and the cruelty it breeds, the gross stupidities of the powerful, the indifference of the well-to-do, the divisions of the intelligent and well-meaning, the apathy of the wretched multitude - these things will be with us to the end of the race.

Hence civilization will always be at risk, and every age is prudent to regard the threats to it with unique seriousness. All good societies breed enemies whose combined hostility can prove fatal. There is no easy defensive formula, and the most effective strategy is to identify the malign forces quickly, as and when they appear. That has been the chief purpose of this book. At the same time, there are certain salient principles, valid always but of special relevance today, which we should take particular care to uphold. They are the Ten Pillars of our Civilization; or, to put in another way, a new and secular Ten Commandments, designed not, indeed, to replace the old, but rather to update and reinforce their social message.