ays at the base
of the edifice, supporting all, subordinate to all, and the most
necessary of all, there has been the working cultivator, peasant, serf,
or slave. Save for a little water-power, a little use of windmills, the
traction of a horse or mule, this class has been the source of all the
work upon which the community depends. And, moreover, whatever labour
town developments have demanded has been supplied by the muscle of its
fecund ranks. It has been, in fact--and to some extent still is--the
multitudinous living machinery of the old social order; it carried,
cropped, tilled, built, and made. And, directing and sometimes owning
this human machinery, there has always been a superior class, bound
usually by a point of honour not to toil, often warlike, often
equestrian, and sometimes cultivated. In England this is the gentility,
in most European countries it is organized as a nobility; it is
represented in the history of India by the "twice born" castes, and in
China--the most philosophically conceived and the most stably organized
social system the old order ever developed--it finds its equivalent in
the members of a variously buttoned mandarinate, who ride, not on
horses, but on a once adequate and still respectable erudition. These
two primary classes may and do become in many cases complicated by
subdivisions; the peasant class may split into farmers and labourers,
the gentlemen admit a series of grades and orders, kings, dukes, earls,
and the like, but the broad distinction remains intact, as though it
was a distinction residing in the nature of things.[21]

From the very dawn of history until the first beginnings of mechanism in
the eighteenth century, this simple scheme of orders was the universal
organization of all but savage humanity, and the chief substance of
history until these later years has been in essence the perpetual
endeavour of specific social systems of this type to attain in every
region the locally suitable permanent form, in face of those two
inveterate enemies of human stability, innovation, and that secular
increase in population that security permits. The imperfection of the
means of communication rendered political unions of a greater area than
that swept by a hundred-mile radius highly unstable. It was a world of
small states. Lax empires came and went, at the utmost they were the
linking of practically autonomous states under a common _Pax_. Wars were
usually wars between kingdoms, c