50 THE WORLD MACHINE 



develop ideas of right and wrong. These, established by custom, 

 finally became law. He had organised the primitive state. 



Long before this he had learned to cook. The chance dis- 

 covery that in cocoa-nuts, cracked and exposed to the air, the 

 milk became bitter and produced a singular feeling of exhilara- 

 tion, made him a brewer. He became a worker in mud and 

 clay. In due time he learned to chip flints, to fashion weapons, 

 then implements. 



The discovery of fire was the most momentous event of 

 his early history. By this means he became a chemist, a potter, 

 a worker in glass, a metallurgist, eventually a mechanic. In 

 the beginning these were doubtless the occupations of the 

 slave. Nature's nobleman, the blonde beast, despised work. 

 It was easier to steal, more exciting to hunt. His natural 

 instincts of cruelty and lust were glutted by the rape and slaughter 

 of other tribes ; the portions that remained were made menials 

 and serfs. Slavery was the universal characteristic of primitive 

 brute society ; it survived throughout antiquity. All the so- 

 called civilisations of the Mediterranean basin, from the earliest 

 of the Egyptians to the latest of the Romans, were founded 

 upon slavery. 



It was doubtless a world-wide characteristic. To work was 

 ignoble, and it is curious to see how this primitive idea of nobility 

 has survived among the property-holding classes of all times. 

 The British land-holder despising " trade," the dilettanti and 

 drones of all classes deploring the invasions of " commercialism," 

 are a late survival of a society that was archetypal to Plato 

 and his kind. From the beginning, human associations seem 

 to have been made up of an aristocracy of spoliation and a 

 proletariat of service. It was only with the invention of the 

 steam-engine, the introduction of machinery, the enhancement 

 in value of labour, the cheapening of its products, that the 

 mass of humankind was manumitted from its world-old con- 

 dition of essential serfdom. 



It is easy to see that it was the slave, the worker, who, to 

 lighten the burden of his lot, was the inventor, the improver, 

 and out of this the observer and the experimenter. The hands 

 which fashioned the primitive grist-mills and water-wheels, 

 that lifted the first sails, that devised the rudder, that learned 

 to hitch a forked stick to an ox and with it to stir up the ground, 

 were the hands of the serf. The occupations of the strong, 



