among the pastoral savages of South Africa. I believe it
to be a very important one on account of its rigour and its regularity.
It must have existed from the earliest times, and have been, in
continuous operation, generation after generation, down to the present
day.'[5]

[5] Ethnological Society's Transactions, vol. iii. p. 137.

Man, being the strongest of all animals, differs from the rest; he was
obliged to be his own domesticator; he had to tame himself. And the way
in which it happened was, that the most obedient, the tamest tribes
are, at the first stage in the real struggle of life, the strongest and
the conquerors. All are very wild then; the animal vigour, the savage
virtue of the race has died out in none, and all have enough of it. But
what makes one tribe--one incipient tribe, one bit of a tribe--to
differ from another is their relative faculty of coherence. The
slightest symptom of legal development, the least indication of a
military bond, is then enough to turn the scale. The compact tribes
win, and the compact tribes are the tamest. Civilisation begins,
because the beginning of civilisation is a military advantage. Probably
if we had historic records of the ante-historic ages--if some
superhuman power had set down the thoughts and actions of men ages
before they could set them down for themselves--we should know that
this first step in civilisation was the hardest step. But when we come
to history as it is, we are more struck with the difficulty of the next
step. All the absolutely incoherent men--all the 'Cyclopes'--have been
cleared away long before there was an authentic account of them. And
the least coherent only remain in the 'protected' parts of the world,
as we may call them. Ordinary civilisation begins near the
Mediterranean Sea; the best, doubtless, of the ante-historic
civilisations were not far off. From this centre the conquering
SWARM--for such it is--has grown and grown; has widened its subject
territories steadily, though not equably, age by age. But geography
long defied it. An Atlantic Ocean, a Pacific Ocean, an Australian
Ocean, an unapproachable interior Africa, an inaccessible and
undesirable hill India, were beyond its range. In such remote places
there was no real competition, and on them inferior, half-combined men
continued to exist. But in the regions of rivalry--the regions where
the better man pressed upon the worse man--such half-made associations
could not last