Page:A General Sketch of Political History from the Earlist Times.djvu/20

 8 EARLY PEOPLES AND EMPIRES garments, and handier utensils. The more improvements they made the more they wanted ; and they found that a great deal of labour was saved by every man doing the things that he could do best, leaving other men to do the things that they could do best, and exchanging the things that they had made but did not want for themselves for other things which they wanted and their neighbours had made but did not want. Division of labour in a community made progress much more rapid. As communities settled down they found that much more was to be got out of making bargains for mutual advantage with other communities than by fighting. So arose commerce or exchange between different communities, which corresponded very much to Customs and division of labour within each community. At a Laws. ver y early stage, long before there had been any settling down, every tribe had got habits or customs of its own which the members were obliged to obey. The bigger the com- munity grew the more necessary it became for rules to be fixed which the whole community was bound to obey ; all the more so when different tribes joined together whose customs varied. When large communities settled down together, all agreeing to be bound by the same laws, they formed a state. Naturally the first large communities which settled permanently did so in the places which were the most fertile, and where it was easiest to keep up a friendly intercourse with neighbour communities. That is why the first states are found in the two great river basins of the Nile and the Euphrates. The states would settle down under an ordered government. In all early states there was a ruling class and a slave class, the descendants respectively of conquering and con- quered tribes. As soon as there is anything to show what sort of government was in existence, we find a king. But we cannot say with any certainty that kingship always grew up in the same way. What does seem certain is that no tribes or communities were ever sufficiently organised to form themselves into a permanent State until they had arrived at some kind of a monarchy. When we pass from this account of a prehistoric society, we