Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/748

 728 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

and all animals that could be ensnared or killed were eaten. Here was another large, dangerous, savage animal that must be killed whenever found, for the safety of the group. What more natural than that when captured and killed its flesh should be eaten, as was the practice with other animals ! Such was the origin of cannibalism, a practice common to a certain stage in the development of every race of men whose history is known or can be traced back to that stage, and one which persisted in the Aryan race of Europe down to the time of Julius Caesar. With the rapidly increasing frequency of encounters between races and the growth of a taste for human flesh (which is said to be the most highly flavored of all meats), the different races of men became the mutual game of one another, and man literally preyed upon man. This, of course, soon became a test of the relative strength of different races, and an era of universal war- fare naturally supervened. How long this lasted during that great pre-historic antiquity of man can, of course, never be known ; but when the curtain at last slowly rose over the world, it revealed a scene which is now commonly denominated the "struggle of races." I do not propose to enter here into a description of this great sociological process. This has been done by others, and I have unavoidably encountered and dealt with it in places where I could do it more justice than I could hope to do here. 1 shall therefore confine myself to pointing out the role that it has played in social integration.

The man-hunting and head-hunting stages have practically passed in the existing races of man, but history has revealed to us the social process that succeeded these and which has brought the world to its present state. The first stage was that of war and the measuring of the military strength of the races of men. This divided mankind into two great classes, the conquering races and the conquered races. Conquest was at first followed by the complete destruction and annihilation of the conquered races. This was succeeded by, first, the enslavement of the comely women of the conquered race, then by that of the soldiery, and finally by that of a large part of the subject race. At still later stages there arose between the conquering or ruling class and