They
flourished unrecorded, ignoring the past and unsuspicious of the future,
for as yet writing had still to begin.
Very slowly did man increase his demand upon the illimitable wealth
of Power that offered itself on every hand to him. He tamed certain
animals, he developed his primordially haphazard agriculture into a
ritual, he added first one metal to his resources and then another,
until he had copper and tin and iron and lead and gold and silver to
supplement his stone, he hewed and carved wood, made pottery, paddled
down his river until he came to the sea, discovered the wheel and made
the first roads. But his chief activity for a hundred centuries and
more, was the subjugation of himself and others to larger and larger
societies. The history of man is not simply the conquest of external
power; it is first the conquest of those distrusts and fiercenesses,
that self-concentration and intensity of animalism, that tie his hands
from taking his inheritance. The ape in us still resents association.
From the dawn of the age of polished stone to the achievement of the
Peace of the World, man's dealings were chiefly with himself and his
fellow man, trading, bargaining, law-making, propitiating, enslaving,
conquering, exterminating, and every little increment in Power, he
turned at once and always turns to the purposes of this confused
elaborate struggle to socialise.
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