eneral
characteristics of the earlier civilizations as compared with the later
civilizations of Europe. Such homogeneous communities, developing from
the first without the jar of conflict between different customs, laws,
religions, etc., would show a much greater uniformity. The concentrating
and conservative forces would all, so to speak, pull together. Rival
chieftains would not counterbalance each other, nor diversities of
belief hold the growth of priestly influence in check. Political and
religious power, wealth and knowledge, would thus tend to concentrate in
the same centres. The same causes which tended to produce the hereditary
king and hereditary priest would tend to produce the hereditary artisan
and laborer, and to separate society into castes. The power which
association sets free for progress would thus be wasted, and barriers to
further progress be gradually raised. The surplus energies of the masses
would be devoted to the construction of temples, palaces, and pyramids;
to ministering to the pride and pampering the luxury of their rulers;
and should any disposition to improvement arise among the classes of
leisure it would at once be checked by the dread of innovation. Society
developing in this way must at length stop in a conservatism which
permits no further progress.

How long such a state of complete petrifaction, when once reached, will
continue, seems to depend upon external causes, for the iron bonds of
the social environment which grows up repress disintegrating forces as
well as improvement. Such a community can be most easily conquered, for
the masses of the people are trained to a passive acquiescence in a life
of hopeless labor. If the conquerors merely take the place of the ruling
class, as the Hyksos did in Egypt and the Tartars in China, everything
will go on as before. If they ravage and destroy, the glory of palace
and temple remains but in ruins, population becomes sparse, and
knowledge and art are lost.

European civilization differs in character from civilizations of the
Egyptian type because it springs not from the association of a
homogeneous people developing from the beginning, or at least for a long
time, under the same conditions, but from the association of peoples who
in separation had acquired distinctive social characteristics, and whose
smaller organizations longer prevented the concentration of power and
wealth in one centre. The physical conformation of the Grecian peni