Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 26, 1915.djvu/28

 18 more elaborately explains, "From the very beginning, the conquest of one people over another has been, in the main, the conquest of the social man over the anti-social man." ... "Where there neither is, nor has been, any war, there is no government." Strong government, says Sir Edward Tylor, speaking to the same effect, sets up "the warrior-tyrant to do work too harsh and heavy for the feebler hands of the patriarch." Nothing short, it would seem, of a military despotism can infuse into a tribe that is just emerging from that precarious and ineffectual condition known as the state of nature a spirit of "intense legality," a stringent respect for the rights of others and notably for the rights of property; apart from which chastened frame of mind it is impossible to pass out of the savage tribe into the civilized nation. To sum up in Bagehot's words, "It is a rule of the first times that you can infer merit from conquest, and that progress is promoted by the competitive examination of constant war."

Now someone may object that such an anthropological justification of war, which is by this time a very old story, represents little more than an application, crude, wholesale, and a priori, of the Darwinian hypothesis to the facts of politics; though, to be sure, such an objection is usually raised only when an extension of the argument to our own politics is thought to be implied. If, however, the generalization be taken as referring solely to savages of the predatory type, there is certainly no lack of empirical proofs whereby it might be confirmed. Since it is out of the question to survey the evidence here, let a single illustrative case be cited as being perhaps sufficiently crucial for our purpose. Mr. M'Dougall, who enjoys the two-fold advantage of being a trained thinker and a