st, on the way to understanding. For a time
I did so shape the world in my mind that it seemed to me no more than a
vast enterprise for the organization and exploitation of labor. For a
time I thought human life was essentially a labor problem, that working
and controlling work and lending and selling and "speculating" made the
essential substance of human life, over which the forms of politics ran
as the stripes of a tiger's skin run and bend over its living muscles. I
followed my period in thinking that. You will find in Ferrero's "Roman
Decline," which was published early in this century, and which waits for
you in the library, almost exactly the method of interpretation that was
recommending itself to me in 1904 and 1905.

Well, the labor problem concerns a great--_substantial_, shall I
say?--in human society. It is only I think the basis and matter of
society, not its shape and life and reality, but it had to be
apprehended before I could get on to more actual things. Insensibly the
idea that contemporary political forms mattered very fundamentally to
men, was fading out of my mind. The British Empire and the German
Empire, the Unity of Italy, and Anglo-Saxon ascendency, the Yellow Peril
and all the other vast phantoms of the World-politician's mythology were
fading out of my mind in those years, as the Olympic cosmogony must have
faded from the mind of some inquiring Greek philosopher in the days of
Heraclitus. And I revised my history altogether in the new light. The
world had ceased to be chaotic in my mind; it had become a vast if as
yet a quite inconclusive drama between employer and employed.

It makes a wonderful history, this history of mankind as a history of
Labor, as a history of the perpetual attempts of an intelligent minority
to get things done by other people. It does not explain how that
aggression of the minority arose nor does it give any conception of a
primordial society which corresponds with our knowledge of the realities
of primitive communities. One begins rather in the air with a human
society that sells and barters and sustains contracts and permits land
to be privately owned, and having as hastily as possible got away from
that difficulty of beginnings, having ignored the large areas of the
world which remain under a pacific and unprogressive agriculture to this
day, the rest of the story becomes extremely convincing and
illuminating. It does indeed give a sustaining explanation to a larg