But since the very dawn of history at least this Normal Social Life has never been the whole complete life of mankind.  Quite apart from the marginal life of the savage hunter, there have been a number of forces and influences within men and women and without, that have produced abnormal and surplus ways of living, supplemental, additional, and even antagonistic to this normal scheme.

And first as to the forces within men and women.  Long as it has lasted, almost universal as it has been, the human being has never yet achieved a perfect adaptation to the needs of the Normal Social Life.  He has attained nothing of that frictionless fitting to the needs of association one finds in the bee or the ant.  Curiosity, deep stirrings to wander, the still more ancient inheritance of the hunter, a recurrent distaste for labour, and resentment against the necessary subjugations of family life have always been a straining force within the agricultural community.  The increase of population during periods of prosperity has led at the touch of bad seasons and adversity to the desperate reliefs of war and the invasion of alien localities.  And the nomadic and adventurous spirit of man found reliefs and opportunities more particularly along the shores of great rivers and inland seas.  Trade and travel began, at first only a trade in adventitious things, in metals and rare objects and luxuries and slaves.  With trade came writing and money; the inventions of debt and rent, usury and tribute.  History finds already in its beginnings a thin network of trading and slaving flung over the world of the Normal Social Life, a network whose strands are the early roads, whose knots are the first towns and the first courts.

Indeed, all recorded history is in a sense the history of these surplus and supplemental activities of mankind.  The Normal Social Life flowed on in its immemorial fashion, using no letters, needing no records, leaving no history.  Then, a little minority, bulking disproportionately in the record, come the trader, the sailor, the slave, the landlord and the tax-compeller, the townsman and the king.

All written history is the story of a minority and their peculiar and abnormal affairs.  Save in so far as it notes great natural catastrophes and tells of the spreading or retrocession of human life through changes of climate and physical conditions it resolves itself into an account of a series of attacks and modifications and supplements made by excessive and superfluous forces engendered within the community upon the Normal Social Life.  The very invention of writing is a part of those modifying developments.  The Normal Social Life is essentially illiterate and traditional.  The Normal Social Life is as mute as the standing crops; it is as seasonal and cyclic as nature herself, and reaches towards the future only an intimation of continual repetitions.