Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 18.djvu/311

Rh against the Persians. So, too, was it with the Teutonic races. The German tribes, originally without federal bond, formed occasional alliances for war. Between the first and fifth centuries these tribes gradually massed into great groups for resistance against or attack upon Rome. During the subsequent century the prolonged military confederations of peoples "of the same blood" had become states. And afterward these became aggregated into still larger states. And, to take a comparatively modern instance, it was during the wars between France and England that each passed from that condition, in which its component feudal groups were in considerable degrees independent, to the condition of a consolidated nation. As further showing how integration of smaller societies into larger ones is thus initiated, it may be added that at first the unions exist only for military purposes: each component society retains for a long time its independent internal administration, and it is only when joint action in war has become habitual that the cohesion is made permanent by a common political organization.

This compounding of smaller communities into larger by military coöperation is insured by the disappearance of such smaller communities as do not coöperate. Barth remarks that "the Fúlbe [Fulahs] are continually advancing, as they have not to do with one strong enemy, but with a number of small tribes without any bond of union." Of the Damaras, Galton says: "If one werft is plundered, the adjacent ones rarely rise to defend it, and thus the Namaquas have destroyed or enslaved piecemeal about one half of the whole Damara population." Similarly, according to Ondegardo, with the Inca conquests in Peru: "There was no general opposition to their advance, for each province merely defended its land without aid from any other." This process, so obvious and familiar, I name because it has a meaning which needs emphasizing. For we here see that, in the struggle for existence among societies, the survival of the fittest is the survival of those in which the power of military coöperation is the greatest; and military coöperation is that primary kind of coöperation which prepares the way for other kinds of coöperation. So that this formation of larger societies by the union of smaller ones in war, and this destruction or absorption of the smaller ununited societies by the united larger ones, is an inevitable process through which the varieties of men most adapted for social life supplant the less adapted varieties.

Respecting the integration thus effected, it remains only to remark that it necessarily follows this course—necessarily begins with the formation of simple groups and advances by the compounding and the recompounding of these. Impulsive in conduct and with feeble powers of coöperation, savages cohere so slightly that only small bodies of them can maintain their integrity. Not until such small bodies have severally had their members bound to one another by some slight political organization does it become possible to unite them into larger