POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS PRELIMINARY. 9 







Every advance in strength, speed, agility, or sagacity in creatures of 

 the one class, has necessitated a corresponding advance in creatures of 

 the other class ; and without never-ending efforts to catch and to 

 escape, with loss of life as the penalty for failure, the progress of 

 neither could have been achieved. 



Mark now, however, that while this merciless discipline of nature, 

 " red in tooth and claw," has been essential to the evolution of sentient 

 life, its persistence through all time with all creatures must not be 

 inferred. The high organization evolved by and for this universal 

 conflict is not necessarily for ever employed to like ends : the result- 

 ing power and intelligence admit of being far otherwise employed. 

 Not for offense and defense only are the inherited structures useful, 

 but for various other purposes ; and these various other purposes may 

 finally become the exclusive purposes. The myriads of years of war- 

 fare which have developed the powers of all lower types of creatures 

 have bequeathed to the highest type of creature the powers now used 

 by him for countless objects besides those of killing and avoiding 

 being killed. His teeth and nails are but little employed in fight ; and 

 his mind is not ordinarily occupied in devising ways of destroying 

 other creatures, or guarding himself from injury by them. 



Similarly with social organisms. We must recognize the truth 

 that the struggle for existence between societies has been instrumental 

 to their evolution. Neither the consolidation and reconsolidation of 

 small social groups into large ones, nor the organization of such com- 

 pound and doubly compound groups, nor the concomitant develop- 

 ments of all those aids to a wider and higher life which civilization 

 has brought, would have been possible without intertribal and inter- 

 national conflicts. Social cooperation is initiated by joint defense and 

 offense ; and from the cooperation thus initiated all kinds of coopera- 

 tions have arisen. Inconceivable as have been the horrors caused by 

 this universal antagonism which, beginning with the chronic hostilities 

 of small hordes tens of thousands of years ago, has ended in the occa- 

 sional vast battles of immense nations, we must nevertheless admit that 

 without them the world would still have been inhabited only by men 

 of feeble types, sheltering in caves and living on wild food. 



But now observe that the intersocial struggle for existence which 

 has been indispensable in evolving societies will not necessarily play 

 in the future a part like that which it has played in the past. Recog- 

 nizing our indebtedness to war for forming great communities and 

 developing their structures, we may yet infer that the acquired powers, 

 available for other activities, will lose their original activities. While 

 conceding that without these perpetual bloody strifes civilized societies 

 could not have arisen, and that an adapted form of human nature, 

 fierce as well as intelligent, was a needful concomitant, we may at the 

 same time hold that, such societies having been produced, the brutality 

 of nature in their units which was necessitated by the process, ceasing 



