eems poor and niggard; where the exuberant life of
tropical forests mocks barbarous man's puny efforts to control; where
mountains, deserts, or arms of the sea separate and isolate men;
association, and the power of improvement which it evolves, can at first
go but a little way. But on the rich plains of warm climates, where
human existence can be maintained with a smaller expenditure of force,
and from a much smaller area, men can keep closer together, and the
mental power which can at first be devoted to improvement is much
greater. Hence civilization naturally first arises in the great valleys
and table-lands where we find its earliest monuments.

But these diversities in natural conditions, not merely thus directly
produce diversities in social development, but, by producing diversities
in social development, bring out in man himself an obstacle, or rather
an active counterforce, to improvement. As families and tribes are
separated from each other, the social feeling ceases to operate between
them, and differences arise in language, custom, tradition, religion--in
short, in the whole social web which each community, however small or
large, constantly spins. With these differences, prejudices grow,
animosities spring up, contact easily produces quarrels, aggression
begets aggression, and wrong kindles revenge.[45] And so between these
separate social aggregates arises the feeling of Ishmael and the spirit
of Cain, warfare becomes the chronic and seemingly natural relation of
societies to each other, and the powers of men are expended in attack or
defense, in mutual slaughter and mutual destruction of wealth, or in
warlike preparations. How long this hostility persists, the protective
tariffs and the standing armies of the civilized world to-day bear
witness; how difficult it is to get over the idea that it is not theft
to steal from a foreigner, the difficulty in procuring an international
copyright act will show. Can we wonder at the perpetual hostilities of
tribes and clans? Can we wonder that when each community was isolated
from the others--when each, uninfluenced by the others, was spinning its
separate web of social environment, which no individual can escape, that
war should have been the rule and peace the exception? "They were even
as we are."

Now, warfare is the negation of association. The separation of men into
diverse tribes, by increasing warfare, thus checks improvement; while in
the localities where