LIFE 361 



the scientific historian has to deal. These influences are 

 just as strongly at work in more fully civilised societies, 

 but their action is more difificult to trace, and is frequently 

 obscured by the temporary action of individual men and 

 individual groups. The obscurity only disappears when 

 we deal with average results, long periods, and large areas. 

 The savage who fights with his neighbour in order to kill 

 and eat him, is an obvious example of the struggle for 

 existence. The contest of modern nations for markets in 

 Africa and Asia, their strife for the possession of trade 

 routes, their attempts to cheapen their manufactures, and 

 to better educate their artizans, may in reality be described 

 by the same laws of evolution, but the manifestation of 

 these laws is far more complex and difficult to analyse. 

 This rivalry is at bottom the struggle for existence, 

 which is still moulding the growth of nations ; but history, 

 as it is now written, conceals, under the formal cloak of 

 dynasties, wars, and foreign policies, those physical and 

 physiological principles by which science will ultimately 

 resume the development of man. 



S 1 4. — Primitive History describable in terms of the 

 Pri7iciples of Evolution 



The economical condition of any nation during a given 

 period is closely associated with its rate of reproductivity 

 and with its indirect struggle against its neighbours for 

 land and food. Not less important for the stability of 

 any nation is the nature of the prevailing forms of owner- 

 ship, sex-relationship, and family life. But the continual 

 variations in these forms are in modern history usually 

 hidden under problems of trade and exchange, under civil 

 laws as to ownership, inheritance, marriage, and divorce, 

 or under statistics of pauperism, emigration, and sexual 

 morality. The old factors of evolution are there, but they 

 are disguised. It is only when we turn to a less complex 

 stage of social growth that we fully grasp the direct 

 bearing which the struggle for food and for the gratifica- 

 tion of the sexual instincts has had in moulding human 



