unications; the adjustments so
arrived at being already in an early state of rearrangement through the
advent of the ship. The communities of Europe were still for the larger
part small isolated tribes and kingdoms, such kingdoms as a mainly
pedestrian militia, or at any rate a militia without transport, and
drawn from (and soon drawn home again by) agricultural work, might hold
together. The increase of transit facilities between such communities,
by the development of shipping and the invention of the wheel and the
made road, spelt increased trade perhaps for a time, but very speedily a
more extensive form of war, and in the end either the wearing away of
differences and union, or conquest. Man is the creature of a struggle
for existence, incurably egoistic and aggressive. Convince him of the
gospel of self-abnegation even, and he instantly becomes its zealous
missionary, taking great credit that his expedients to ram it into the
minds of his fellow-creatures do not include physical force--and if that
is not self-abnegation, he asks, what is? So he has been, and so he is
likely to remain. Not to be so, is to die of abnegation and extinguish
the type. Improvement in transit between communities formerly for all
practical purposes isolated, means, therefore, and always has meant, and
I imagine, always will mean, that now they can get at one another. And
they do. They inter-breed and fight, physically, mentally, and
spiritually. Unless Providence is belied in His works that is what they
are meant to do.

A third invention which, though not a means of transit like the wheeled
vehicle and the ship, was yet a means of communication, rendered still
larger political reactions possible, and that was the development of
systems of writing. The first empires and some sort of written speech
arose together. Just as a kingdom, as distinguished from a mere tribal
group of villages, is almost impossible without horses, so is an empire
without writing and post-roads. The history of the whole world for three
thousand years is the history of a unity larger than the small kingdom
of the Heptarchy type, endeavouring to establish itself under the stress
of these discoveries of horse-traffic and shipping and the written word,
the history, that is, of the consequences of the partial shattering of
the barriers that had been effectual enough to prevent the fusion of
more than tribal communities through all the long ages before the dawn
of histor