As a civilization matures, wealth and power (the means of exploitation) are increased in volume and concentrated in fewer hands.  The resulting absolutism with its immense structure of wealth production and its well-organized military arm, imposes conformity to its decrees, servility, peonage and even slavery on the working masses.  The masses, in their turn, organize, agitate, demonstrate, strike, sabotage, and periodically take up, arms in defense of their lives and their livelihood.

We are describing certain political aspects of a process of social selection which has dominated one civilization after another.  At the present moment it has reached a critical stage in the West.  We apply the term “social selection” to the result of this process because there is a parallel between the natural selection of the biologists and the social selection which sociologists observe in the rapid and extensive changes presently taking place in the centers of western civilization.

Natural selection is a process in the course of which many compete and contend while only a few survive and mature.

Social selection is a similar knock-down and drag-out struggle in which peoples, nations, empires and civilizations take part.  Many enter the contest but only a few live to write their story in the long and complex history of civilizations.

At the outset of such a contest, the European-Asian-African cradle of the coming western culture contained numerous political fragments—­kingdoms, principalities, cities, city states, inert peasant masses, migrating tribes—­struggling locally and regionally for a place in the sun, or for additional territory and extended authority.  These struggles reached the military level in local wars, regional wars, general wars.  In the course of this survival struggle, the weakest and least effective contestants were defeated, dismembered and gobbled up by their stronger and more efficient opponents.

Local struggles—­in the Near and Middle East, in North Africa, in eastern, central and western Europe—­were trial heats in the course of which many contestants were eliminated, while the survivors continued the process of city, nation and empire building at higher and broader levels.  It was only after five hundred years of such conflicts that the outlines of western civilization took definite political form:—­a group of battle-hardened contestants, centered in Europe, heavily armed and equipped, intent on protecting and enlarging their home territory and extending their authority over dependencies and colonies in various parts of the planet.

This survival struggle continued for another three hundred years, down to the beginning of the present century, reaching its highest level of intensity between 1914 and 1945, with contestants from all of the continents taking an active part.  In this present round the contestants are nations and empires, organized in ever-changing alliances.  Some of the contestants are old, scarred and battle weary.  Others are young and vigorous, recent entrants in the planet-wide contest for pelf, possessions and power.