future, for as yet writing had still to begin.

Very slowly did man increase his demand upon the illimitable

wealth of Power that offered itself on every hand to him. He

tamed certain animals, he developed his primordially haphazard

agriculture into a ritual, he added first one metal to his

resources and then another, until he had copper and tin and iron

and lead and gold and silver to supplement his stone, he hewed

and carved wood, made pottery, paddled down his river until he

came to the sea, discovered the wheel and made the first roads.

But his chief activity for a hundred centuries and more, was the

subjugation ofhimself and others to larger and larger societies.

The history of man is not simply the conquest of external power;

it is first the conquest of those distrusts and fiercenesses,

that self-concentration and intensity of animalism, that tie his

hands from taking his inheritance. The ape in us still resents

association. From the dawn of the age of polished stone to the

achievement of the Peace of the World, man's dealings were

chiefly withhimself and his fellow man, trading, bargaining,

law-making, propitiating, enslaving, conquering, exterminating,

and every little increment in Power, he turned at once and always

turns to the purposes of thisconfused elaborate struggle to

socialise. To incorporate and comprehend his fellow men into a

community of purpose became the last and greatest of his

instincts. Already before the last polished phase of the stone

age was over he had become a political animal. He made

<<BackPagesTo menuForward>>