Page:Footfalls of Indian History.djvu/21

4 Here again, we see examples of the educational value of tribal and pastoral life, in preparing communities for the organisation of nations and empires.

In the far past, those shadowy empires whose memories are all but dead to man—the Assyrian, the Parthian, the Median, and some others—seem to have based their powers of aggression and co-operation on the instincts and associations of the hunter. From one point of view, the hunter is on land what the fisher is on water ; and the soldier is only a hunter of men. But the mind of man is supreme. Even the results of a peculiar occupational education may be appropriated by others, through the intellect alone. In ancient Egypt the world saw a peasant nation stirred to emulation by the sight of empires—Hittite, Babylonian, Cretan, and perhaps Phoenician—and fully able to protect itself by its grasp of the idea of national solidarity and self-defence. This is the value of science, that it analyses a fact, displays the secret of power, and enables man to formulate new methods for arriving at the old result.

The sense of unity can only occur, as a spiritual reaction on the mind, against a manifoldness. Whether it be the cities of Egypt, the tribes of Arabia and Tartary, or the fleet of pirate vessels from many kindred harbours that give birth to this sense, it needs when born to be watched, trained, and guided in definite ways. The patriarch, deeply versed in strategy, must be still more