The World Set Free | Page 4

king began to develop their roles in the opening drama of man's history. The priest's
solicitude was seed-time and harvest and fertility, and the king ruled peace and war. In a
hundred river valleys about the warm, temperate zone of the earth there were already
towns and temples, a score of thousand years ago. 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. To incorporate and comprehend his fellow men
into a community of purpose became the last and greatest of his instincts. Already before
the last polished phase of the stone age was over he had become a political animal. He
made astonishingly far-reaching discoveries within himself, first of counting and then of
writing and making records, and with that his town communities began to stretch out to
dominion; in the valleys of the Nile, the Euphrates, and the great Chinese rivers, the first
empires and the first written laws had their beginnings. Men specialised for fighting and
rule as soldiers and knights. Later, as ships grew seaworthy, the Mediterranean which had

been a barrier became a highway, and at last out of a tangle of pirate polities came the
great struggle of Carthage and Rome. The history of Europe is the history of the victory
and breaking up of the Roman Empire. Every ascendant monarch in Europe up to the last,
aped Caesar and called himself Kaiser or Tsar or Imperator or Kasir-i-Hind. Measured by
the duration of human life it is a vast space of time between that first dynasty in Egypt
and the coming of the aeroplane, but by the scale that looks back to the makers of the
eoliths, it is all of it a story of yesterday.
Now during this period of two hundred centuries or more, this period of the warring
states, while men's minds were chiefly preoccupied by politics and mutual aggression,
their progress in the acquirement of external Power was slow--rapid in comparison with
the progress of the old stone age, but slow in comparison with this new age of systematic
discovery in which we live. They did not very greatly alter the weapons and tactics of
warfare, the methods of agriculture, seamanship, their knowledge of the habitable globe,
or the devices and utensils of domestic life between the days of the early Egyptians and
the days when Christopher Columbus was a child. Of course, there were inventions and
changes, but there were also retrogressions; things were found out and then forgotten
again; it was, on the whole, a progress, but it contained no steps; the peasant life was the
same, there were already priests and lawyers and town craftsmen and territorial lords and
rulers doctors, wise women, soldiers and sailors in Egypt and China and Assyria and
south-eastern Europe at the beginning of that period, and they were doing much the same
things and living much the same life as they were in Europe in A.D. 1500. The English
excavators of the year A.D. 1900 could delve into the remains of Babylon and Egypt and
disinter legal documents, domestic accounts, and family correspondence that they could
read with the completest sympathy. There were great religious and moral changes
throughout the period, empires and republics replaced one another, Italy tried a vast
experiment in slavery, and indeed slavery was tried again and again and failed and failed
and was still to be tested again and rejected again in the New World; Christianity and
Mohammedanism swept away a thousand more specialised cults,