and most warlike qualities
tend principally to good; that the constant winning of these favoured
competitors is the particular mode by which the best qualities wanted
in elementary civilisation are propagated and preserved.

NO. III

NATION-MAKING.

In the last essay I endeavoured to show that in the early age of
man--the 'fighting age' I called it--there was a considerable, though
not certain, tendency towards progress. The best nations conquered the
worst; by the possession of one advantage or another the best
competitor overcame the inferior competitor. So long as there was
continual fighting there was a likelihood of improvement in martial
virtues, and in early times many virtues are really 'martial'--that is,
tend to success in war--which in later times we do not think of so
calling, because the original usefulness is hid by their later
usefulness. We judge of them by the present effects, not by their
first. The love of law, for example, is a virtue which no one now would
call martial, yet in early times it disciplined nations, and the
disciplined nations won. The gift of 'conservative innovation'--the
gift of MATCHING new institutions to old--is not nowadays a warlike
virtue, yet the Romans owed much of their success to it. Alone among
ancient nations they had the deference to usage which, combines
nations, and the partial permission of selected change which improves
nations; and therefore they succeeded. Just so in most cases, all
through the earliest times, martial merit is a token of real merit: the
nation that wins is the nation that ought to win. The simple virtues of
such ages mostly make a man a soldier if they make him anything. No
doubt the brute force of number may be too potent even then (as so
often it is afterwards): civilisation may be thrown back by the
conquest of many very rude men over a few less rude men. But the first
elements of civilisation are great military advantages, and, roughly,
it is a rule of the first times that you can infer merit from conquest,
and that progress is promoted by the competitive examination of
constant war.

This principle explains at once why the 'protected' regions of the
world--the interior of continents like Africa, outlying islands like
Australia or New Zealand--are of necessity backward. They are still in
the preparatory school; they have not been taken on class by class, as
No. II., being a little better, routed effaced No. I.; and as No. III.,
being a