THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY. 579 



Taking the most general view of the matter, we may say that only 

 when the sacred duty of blood-revenge, constituting the religion of 

 the savage, becomes less sacred, does there arise a possibility of emer- 

 gence from the deepest barbarism. Only as fast as the retaliation, 

 which for a murder on one side inflicts a murder or murders on the 

 other, becomes less imperative, is it possible for larger aggregates of 

 men to hold together and civilization to commence. And so, too, out 

 of lower stages of civilization higher ones can emerge, only as there 

 diminishes this pursuit of international revenge and re-revenge, which 

 the code we inherit from the savage insists upon. Such advantages, 

 bodily and mental, as the race derives from the discipline of war, are 

 outbalanced by the disadvantages, physical and moral, but especially 

 moral, which result after a certain stage of progress is reached. Se- 

 vere and bloody as the process is, the killing-off of inferior races and 

 inferior individuals leaves a balance of benefit to mankind during 

 phases of progress in which the moral development is low, and there 

 are no quick sympathies to be continually seared by the infliction of 

 pain and death. But as there arise higher types of societies, implying 

 types of individual character fitted for closer cooperation, the destruc- 

 tive activities exercised by such higher societies have injurious reac- 

 tive effects on the moral natures of their members, which outweigh the 

 benefit resulting from extirpation of inferior races. After this stage 

 lias been reached, the purifying process, continuing still an important 

 one, remains to be carried on by industrial war by a competition of 

 societies during which the best, physically, emotionally, and intellect- 

 ually, spread most, and leave the least capable to disappear gradually, 

 from failing to leave an adequately-numerous posterity. 



Those educated in the religion of enmity those who during boy- 

 hood, when the instincts of the savage are dominant, have revelled in 

 the congenial ideas and sentiments which classic poems and histories 

 yield so abundantly, and have become confirmed in the belief that war 

 is virtuous aud peace ignoble are naturally blind to truths of this 

 kind. Rather should we say, perhaps, that they have never turned 

 their eyes in search of such truths. And their bias is so strong that 

 nothing more than a nominal recognition of such truths is possible to 

 them ; if even this. What perverted conceptions of sociological phe- 

 nomena this bias produces, may be seen in the following passage from 

 Gibbon : 



"It was scarcely possible that the eyes of contemporaries should discover in 

 the public felicity the causes of decay and corruption. The long peace, and the 

 uniform government of the Romans, had introduced a slow and secret poison in- 

 to the vitals of the empire." x 



In which sentences there is involved the abstract proposition that in 

 proportion as men are long held together in that mutual dependence 



1 11 



Decline and Fall," chapter ii. 



