, being altered and on the whole
improved, throughout the process. At one point, of high importance for
our argument, a larger form of association was achieved before the
necessary constituent elements were articulated. This was the
Greco-Roman world encircling the Mediterranean and completed in the
Roman Empire of the second century A.D. It was the nucleus from which
the Western world of modern civilization has been developed; yet it was
there, settled in its main outlines, before the national units which it
required for internal harmony and cohesion had taken any definite shape.
It is to the difficulties of their growth and mutual adjustment that we
owe most of the conflicts of modern history.

We shall in this book go back first to a still earlier stage, a stage of
pre-history, to a time when no one, not gifted with superhuman insight
and prescience, could have foreseen the course which human civilization
would pursue. All over the world, for tens of thousands of years, a
culture persisted, associated with stone implements, and marked by a
similarity which is often extremely striking, in races and tribes widely
severed by distance and climatic conditions. The raw material of the
human product in science, art, and invention was alike in texture
although often exuberant in detail and imagination. But it had not yet
the unity of an organic whole, knit by a common purpose and conscious of
itself.

To gain the cohesion of large numbers of men by whom wealth could be
created and sufficient leisure and independence secured for an
intellectual life, not dictated by the necessities of existence, a
special concurrence of favourable physical conditions was required. The
rich and secluded river-basins of many parts of the world provided this,
and in consequence we find similar large communities arising at the end
of the Stone Age in such places as China, Peru, Mexico, and above all in
Mesopotamia and Egypt. The last named derived their special importance
for the sequel from their proximity to the Mediterranean, which was to
act as the great meeting-place and training-school for adventurous
spirits and inquiring minds. From the busy intercourse of these
land-locked waters arose the civilization called Minoan, or Aegean,
centring in Crete, itself to be surpassed by the trading activity of the
Phoenicians and the art and science of the Greeks.

It is with the advent of the Greek that the seal is placed upon the
claim of the Medi