122 feature Stubies in Berkshire. 



change, and when the farmers had food to give in 

 barter, the way was open for a peaceful way of get- 

 ting a living. The man of the spade was the man 

 who helped trade. He did still more. He was the 

 means of introducing a new political principle. 

 Hitherto the only conceivable bond of political com- 

 bination was that of kinship. Men organised politic- 

 ally in the family or clan. But now they had interests 

 in common because their lands lay near one another 

 and because they had common occupations. 



But the farmer-type, the industrial kind of man, 

 was bound to be the ablest, the strongest, the fittest 

 to survive. Tribes which had learned to till the 

 ground and rear flocks were the best fitted to rule 

 their neighbours, for the simple and sufficient reason 

 that agriculture lets a vastly greater population live in 

 a given area, by giving them plenty of food, won by 

 tillage. The agricultural tribes were drawn into com- 

 munities, villages, towns, cities. They grew socially. 

 They associated, co-operated, waxed strong in re- 

 sources. They prevailed over their enemies. They 

 not only proved that in union there is strength ; 

 they showed the natural and inevitable advantage 

 of having plenty to eat and wholesome homes. They 

 were living witnesses to the grand truth that the very 

 soil of the earth itself is in league with progress, and 

 peace, and higher ideals of life. They stood for the 

 rise of man, the coming of this child of God into his 

 higher inheritance, the wanderings of this wayfarer 

 among strange scenes toward the real home of his 



