This state of things, as above hinted, could not come to an end as long as men obtained food by seizing upon edible objects already in existence.  The supply of fish, game, or fruit being strictly limited, men must ordinarily fight under penalty of starvation.  If we could put a moral interpretation upon events which antedated morality as we understand it, we should say it was their duty to fight; and the reverence accorded to the chieftain who murdered most successfully in behalf of his clansmen was well deserved.  It is worthy of note that, in isolated parts of the earth where the natural supply of food is abundant, as in sundry tropical islands of the Pacific Ocean, men have ceased from warfare and become gentle and docile without rising above the intellectual level of savagery.  Compared with other savages, they are like the chimpanzee as contrasted with the gorilla.  Such exceptional instances well illustrate the general truth that, so long as the method of obtaining food was the same as that employed by brute animals, men must continue to fight like dogs over a bone.

XII.

First checked by the Beginnings of Industrial Civilization.

But presently man’s superior intelligence came into play in such wise that other and better methods of getting food were devised.  When in intervals of peace men learned to rear flocks and herds, and to till the ground, and when they had further learned to exchange with one another the products of their labour, a new step, of most profound significance, was taken.  Tribes which had once learned how to do these things were not long in overcoming their neighbours, and flourishing at their expense, for agriculture allows a vastly greater population to live upon a given area, and in many ways it favours social compactness.  An immense series of social changes was now begun.  Whereas the only conceivable bond of political combination had heretofore been blood-relationship, a new basis was now furnished by territorial contiguity and by community of occupation.  The supply of food was no longer strictly limited, for it could be indefinitely increased by peaceful industry; and moreover, in the free exchange of the products of labour, it ceased to be true that one man’s interest was opposed to another’s.  Men did not at once recognize this fact, and indeed it has not yet become universally recognized, so long have men persisted in interpreting the conditions of industrial life in accordance with the immemorial traditions of the time when the means of subsistence were strictly limited, so that one man’s success meant another’s starvation.  Our robber tariffs—­miscalled “protective”—­are survivals of the barbarous mode of thinking which fitted the ages before industrial civilization began.  But although the pacific implications of free exchange were very slowly recognized, it is not the less true that the beginnings of agriculture and commerce marked the