verence accorded to the chieftain who murdered most successfully in
behalf of his clansmen was well deserved. It is worthy of note that, in
isolated parts of the earth where the natural supply of food is
abundant, as in sundry tropical islands of the Pacific Ocean, men have
ceased from warfare and become gentle and docile without rising above
the intellectual level of savagery. Compared with other savages, they
are like the chimpanzee as contrasted with the gorilla. Such exceptional
instances well illustrate the general truth that, so long as the method
of obtaining food was the same as that employed by brute animals, men
must continue to fight like dogs over a bone.

XII.

First checked by the Beginnings of Industrial Civilization.

But presently man's superior intelligence came into play in such wise
that other and better methods of getting food were devised. When in
intervals of peace men learned to rear flocks and herds, and to till the
ground, and when they had further learned to exchange with one another
the products of their labour, a new step, of most profound significance,
was taken. Tribes which had once learned how to do these things were not
long in overcoming their neighbours, and flourishing at their expense,
for agriculture allows a vastly greater population to live upon a given
area, and in many ways it favours social compactness. An immense series
of social changes was now begun. Whereas the only conceivable bond of
political combination had heretofore been blood-relationship, a new
basis was now furnished by territorial contiguity and by community of
occupation. The supply of food was no longer strictly limited, for it
could be indefinitely increased by peaceful industry; and moreover, in
the free exchange of the products of labour, it ceased to be true that
one man's interest was opposed to another's. Men did not at once
recognize this fact, and indeed it has not yet become universally
recognized, so long have men persisted in interpreting the conditions of
industrial life in accordance with the immemorial traditions of the time
when the means of subsistence were strictly limited, so that one man's
success meant another's starvation. Our robber tariffs--miscalled
"protective"--are survivals of the barbarous mode of thinking which
fitted the ages before industrial civilization began. But although the
pacific implications of free exchange were very slowly recognized, it is
not the less true th