toms.
The majority of the 'groups' which win and conquer are better than the
majority of those which fail and perish, and thus the first world grow
better and was improved.

This early customary world no doubt continued for ages. The first
history delineates great monarchies, each composed of a hundred
customary groups, all of which believed themselves to be of enormous
antiquity, and all of which must have existed for very many
generations. The first historical world is not a new-looking thing but
a very ancient, and according to principle it is necessary that it
should exist for ages. If human nature was to be gradually improved,
each generation must be born better tamed, more calm, more capable of
civilisation--in a word, more LEGAL than the one before it, and such
inherited improvements are always slow and dubious. Though a few gifted
people may advance much, the mass of each generation can improve but
very little on the generation which preceded it; and even the slight
improvement so gained is liable to be destroyed by some mysterious
atavism--some strange recurrence to a primitive past. Long ages of
dreary monotony are the first facts in the history of human
communities, but those ages were not lost to mankind, for it was then
that was formed the comparatively gentle and guidable thing which we
now call human nature.

And indeed the greatest difficulty is not in preserving such a world
but in ending it. We have brought in the yoke of custom to improve the
world, and in the world the custom sticks. In a thousand cases--in the
great majority of cases--the progress of mankind has been arrested in
this its earliest shape; it has been closely embalmed in a mummy-like
imitation of its primitive existence. I have endeavoured to show in
what manner, and how slowly, and in how few cases this yoke of custom
was removed. It was 'government by discussion ', which broke the bond
of ages and set free the originality of mankind. Then, and then only,
the motives which Lord Macaulay counted on to secure the progress of
mankind, in fact, begin to work; THEN 'the tendency in every man to
ameliorate his condition' begins to be important, because then man can
alter his condition while before he is pegged down by ancient usage;
THEN the tendency in each mechanical art towards perfection begins to
have force, because the artist is at last allowed to seek perfection,
after having been forced for ages to move in the straight furrow of t