Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/173

Rh to the structural peculiarities of any given organism. It follows, therefore, that if the earliest human societies lived, like the animal creation from which they were evolved, by an aggressive struggle with their neighbors, the fundamental social structure must have been one adapted to war.

Let us see if this is not the fact.

The first differentiation traceable in the savage tribes of all times is the rise to power of the strongest or ablest individual of the group, and the growing subordination to his authority of his followers. Along with this is traceable that change in the primitive instincts by which the individual energies are directed to the tribal, rather than the individual welfare, and the latter is in a degree sacrificed to the general good—the germ, in fact, of what we now call patriotism. What advantage to the tribe these changes involve hardly needs stating. Complete subordination to a directing head, like the rapidly co-ordinated muscular actions of a fighting animal, is an absolute necessity to the warlike success of a co-operating group of men. And the willingness of each individual to value the general triumph above his own safety, is no less important to the same end. Out of these two earliest structural adaptations there have grown, in the course of social evolution, a vast complexity of others based upon them, and tending to the successful performance of the same great function—the prosecution of war.

For the elaboration of this truth we refer all who may be skeptical to Herbert Spencer's discussion of the "Militant Type of Society." It suffices for our purpose to point out that this "militant type" is the one in which social organization begins.

In pursuing the ends of early militancy, the active brain of man struck upon a course which has forever lifted him above all other living things, the use and adaptation of external forces for the furtherance of human ends. With the first weapon fashioned by some prehistoric warrior was opened a new field for the exercise of human energy. Work for the purpose of creating was initialed in contrast to the destructive activities of the animal world. Step by step expanding intelligence led the labor of brain and hand first to producing appliances for war, the prosecution of which against both man and beast was necessary to the support of life, and then to supporting life directly by the creation from natural sources of its requirements. To manufacture for man's wants out of Nature's resources began to take the place of a mere sanguinary struggle over her raw materials.

Labor became a partial substitute for fighting.

It needs no demonstration that this new use of the energies had nothing in common with the earlier animal instincts from which the militant social structure evolved. What, then, could