an bear,
though they cannot, and that they die away before them as our fatted
and protected cattle died out before the rinderpest, which is
innocuous, in comparison, to the hardy cattle of the Steppes. Savages
in the first year of the Christian era were pretty much what they were
in the 1800th; and if they stood the contact of ancient civilised men,
and cannot stand ours, it follows that our race is presumably tougher
than the ancient; for we have to bear, and do bear, the seeds of
greater diseases than those the ancients carried with them. We may use,
perhaps, the unvarying savage as a metre to gauge the vigour of the
constitutions to whose contact he is exposed.

Particular consequences may be dubious, but as to the main fact there
is no doubt: the military strength of man has been growing from the
earliest time known to our history, straight on till now. And we must
not look at times known by written records only; we must travel back to
older ages, known to us only by what lawyers call REAL evidence--the
evidence of things. Before history began, there was at least as much
progress in the military art as there has been since. The Roman
legionaries or Homeric Greeks were about as superior to the men of the
shell mounds and the flint implements as we are superior to them. There
has been a constant acquisition of military strength by man since we
know anything of him, either by the documents he has composed or the
indications he has left.

The cause of this military growth is very plain. The strongest nation
has always been conquering the weaker; sometimes even subduing it, but
always prevailing over it. Every intellectual gain, so to speak, that a
nation possessed was in the earliest times made use of--was INVESTED
and taken out--in war; all else perished. Each nation tried constantly
to be the stronger, and so made or copied the best weapons; by
conscious and unconscious imitation each nation formed a type of
character suitable to war and conquest. Conquest improved mankind by
the intermixture of strengths; the armed truce, which was then called
peace, improved them by the competition of training and the consequent
creation of new power. Since the long-headed men first drove the
short-headed men out of the best land in Europe, all European history
has been the history of the superposition of the more military races
over the less military of the efforts, sometimes successful, sometimes
unsuccessful, of each race to ge