Page:The Urantia Book, 1st Edition.djvu/858

 792 All secret associations imposed an oath, enjoined confidence, and taught the keeping of secrets. These orders awed and controlled the mobs; they also acted as vigilance societies, thus practicing lynch law. They were the first spies when the tribes were at war and the first secret police during times of peace. Best of all they kept unscrupulous kings on the anxious seat. To offset them, the kings fostered their own secret police.

These societies gave rise to the first political parties. The first party government was "the strong" vs. "the weak." In ancient times a change of administration only followed civil war, abundant proof that the weak had become strong.

These clubs were employed by merchants to collect debts and by rulers to collect taxes. Taxation has been a long struggle, one of the earliest forms being the tithe, one tenth of the hunt or spoils. Taxes were originally levied to keep up the king's house, but it was found that they were easier to collect when disguised as an offering for the support of the temple service.

By and by these secret associations grew into the first charitable organizations and later evolved into the earlier religious societies—the forerunners of churches. Finally some of these societies became intertribal, the first international fraternities.

The mental and physical inequality of human beings insures that social classes will appear. The only worlds without social strata are the most primitive and the most advanced. A dawning civilization has not yet begun the differentiation of social levels, while a world settled in light and life has largely effaced these divisions of mankind, which are so characteristic of all intermediate evolutionary stages.

As society emerged from savagery to barbarism, its human components tended to become grouped in classes for the following general reasons:

1. Natural—contact, kinship, and marriage; the first social distinctions were based on sex, age, and blood—kinship to the chief.

2. Personal—the recognition of ability, endurance, skill, and fortitude; soon followed by the recognition of language mastery, knowledge, and general intelligence.

3. Chance—war and emigration resulted in the separating of human groups. Class evolution was powerfully influenced by conquest, the relation of the victor to the vanquished, while slavery brought about the first general division of society into free and bond.

4. Economic—rich and poor. Wealth and the possession of slaves was a genetic basis for one class of society.

5. Geographic—classes arose consequent upon urban or rural settlement. City and country have respectively contributed to the differentiation of the herder-agriculturist and the trader-industrialist, with their divergent viewpoints and reactions.

6. Social—classes have gradually formed according to popular estimate of the social worth of different groups. Among the earliest divisions of this sort were the demarcations between priest-teachers, ruler-warriors, capitalist