Page:Henry Mayers Hyndman and William Morris - A Summary of the Principles of Socialism (1884).djvu/6

 now admitted by all scientific writers on the records of primeval man. But the need for food was followed by the need for clothing, for warmth, for shelter; and each of these wants corresponded in turn with changing forms of social life as they were gratified. The whole, in fact, moved in one piece as the economical forms developed: the nomadic life of the woods and plains; the common property of the tribe or clan scanty and insufficient; the more confined area of operations as agriculture became an increasing business; the struggle with neighbouring tribes about rights of pasture or to obtain coveted spoils; the earlier or later introduction of slavery in place of wholesale slaughter of captives; the development of division of labour and exchange slowly breaking up the common property; the institution of private property in land, rendered necessary by the simultaneous improvements in agriculture; the increase of individual wealth, as cultivation and division of labour progressed on a larger scale, due to money-usury and slave-ownership; the construction of classes representing divergent interests; the struggle between the various classes and those above them; the enormous development of the slave class and the poorer citizens in Greece and still more in Rome; the gradual formation of customs, laws, religions growing out of these ever-changing, ever-progressing, economical forms; the constant appeals of the privileged orders to these customs, laws, and religious doctrines as the wisdom of the past not to be rudely shaken by the new-fangled, subversive theories of revolutionists, who were themselves but the unconscious exponents of such inevitable modifications—a careful study of each link in the