438 States. Military service 



all, and drew their share in the form of sustenance provided by the 

 cultivating members, the arrangement presented no insuperable diffi- 

 culty on a small scale. But the tillers of the soil were the persons on 

 whose exertions the life of the community primarily and obviously 

 depended. The formation of a larger unit, a State, probably by some 

 successful warrior chief, made a great change in the situation. A city 

 stronghold established a centre of state life and government, and 

 villages exchanged the privileges and perils of isolation for the position 

 of local hamlets attached to the common centre of the state, and in this 

 new connexion developing what we may fairly call political conscious- 

 ness. Under the new dispensation, what with growth of markets, the 

 invention of coined money, and greater general security, the movement 

 towards individual property proceeded fast. Noble families engrossed 

 much of the best land: and tradition 1 credibly informs us that in one 

 mode or other they imposed the labour of cultivation on the poorer 

 citizens, of course on very onerous terms. 



At this point in the inquiry some help may be got from taking the 

 military view. War, at least defensive war, was a possibility ever 

 present. Kings, and the aristocracies that followed them, had as their 

 prime function to secure the safety of the state. A sort of regular force 

 was provided by the obligation of army service that rested upon all 

 full citizens. The warrior nobles and their kinsmen formed a nucleus. 

 But the free peasant farmers were indispensable in the ranks, and, as 

 their farms usually lay near the frontier, they furnished a hardy and 

 willing militia for border warfare. The craftsmen, smith potter cobbler 

 etc, were now more concentrated in the city, and were always regarded 

 as ill-fitted for service in the field. Naturally the classes that bore a 

 direct part in defence of the state stood higher in general esteem. But 

 to say this is not to say that bodily labour on the land was, as labour, 

 honoured for its own sake. The honour belonged to those who, owning 

 land, either worked it with their own hands or employed the labour of 

 others. I can find no trace of traditional respect for the labourer as 

 labourer until a much later age, when a dearth of free rustic labourers 

 had 'begun to be felt. Then it appeared in the form of yearning 2 for a 

 vanished past, side by side with humanitarian views in relation to 



1 The relative importance of land and the means of cultivation [especially oxen] in early 

 times, the power thus gained by chiefs granting cattle to tenants, and the connexion of these 

 phenomena with legends of debt-slavery, are instructively discussed in Maine's Early history 

 of Institutions , lecture VI. 



2 Mr G G Coulton kindly reminds me of an analogy observable in the history of Art. It 

 is progressive on simple lines up to a certain point. Then it begins to ramify, and differences 

 of taste become more acute. Hence an anarchy of taste, driving men to yearn (like Ruskin, 

 Morris, etc.) for the old simplicity. So the peasant up to a point is useful and noble. But 

 fresh currents of civilization alter his position. Then men yearn for the old simplicity, only 

 defective through being essentially simple. 



