lusts and his fears were all appeased, when the sun shone upon
the squatting-place and dim stirrings of speculation lit his

eyes. He scratched upon a bone and found resemblance and pursued
it and began pictorial art, moulded the soft, warm clay of the

river brink between his fingers, and found a pleasure in its
patternings and repetitions, shaped it into the form of vessels,

and found that it would hold water. He watched the streaming
river, and wondered from what bountiful breast this incessant

water came; he blinked at the sun and dreamt that perhaps he
might snare it and spear it as it went down to its resting-place

amidst the distant hills. Then he was roused to convey to his
brother that once indeed he had done so--at least that some one

had done so--he mixed that perhaps with another dream almost as
daring, that one day a mammoth had been beset; and therewith

began fiction--pointing a way to achievement--and the august
propheticprocession of tales.

For scores and hundreds of centuries, for myriads of generations
that life of our fathers went on. From the beginning to the

ripening of that phase of human life, from the first clumsy
eolith of rudely chipped flint to the first implements of

polished stone, was two or three thousand centuries, ten or
fifteen thousand generations. So slowly, by human standards, did

humanity gather itself together out of the dim intimations of the
beast. And that first glimmering of speculation, that first

story of achievement, that story-teller bright-eyed and flushed
under his matted hair, gesticulating to his gaping, incredulous

listener, gripping his wrist to keep him attentive, was the most
marvellous beginning this world has ever seen. It doomed the

mammoths, and it began the setting of that snare that shall catch
the sun.

Section 2
That dream was but a moment in a man's life, whose proper

business it seemed was to get food and kill his fellows and beget
after the manner of all that belongs to the fellowship of the

beasts. About him, hidden from him by the thinnest of veils, were
the untouched sources of Power, whose magnitude we scarcely do

more than suspect even to-day, Power that could make his every
conceivable dream come real. But the feet of the race were in

the way of it, though he died blindly unknowing.
At last, in the generous levels of warm river valleys, where food

is abundant and life very easy, the emerging human overcoming his
earlier jealousies, becoming, as necessity persecuted him less

urgently, more social and tolerant and amenable, achieved a
larger community. There began a division of labour, certain of

the older men specialised in knowledge and direction, a strong
man took the fatherly leadership in war, and priest and 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, but
essentially these were progressive adaptations of mankind to

material conditions that must have seemed fixed for ever. The
idea of revolutionary changes in the material conditions of life

would have been entirely strange to human thought through all
that time.

Yet the dreamer, the story-teller, was there still, waiting for
his opportunity amidst the busy preoccupations, the comings and

goings, the wars and processions, the castle building and
cathedral building, the arts and loves, the small diplomacies and

incurable feuds, the crusades and trading journeys of the middle
ages. He no longer speculated with the untrammelled freedom of

the stone-age savage; authoritative explanations of everything
barred his path; but he speculated with a better brain, sat idle