SKETCH OF MODERN AGRICULTURE 33 



Reaction of the pastoral life upon character. While this trans- 

 formation in the character of our domestic animals was taking 

 place, similar transformations were taking place in the character 

 of their masters. Those individuals or those tribes who were 

 first to perceive the advantage of possessing flocks and herds, 

 and to avail themselves of that advantage, would prosper out of 

 proportion to their less astute neighbors. In the intense struggle 

 for existence which always took place among savage tribes, the 

 advantage would be on the side of those who availed themselves 

 of this more abundant and more permanent source of food. 

 Those who were too lazy or too stupid to profit by this advantage 

 would be exterminated, or, what amounted to the same thing, 

 would be driven from their lands by their more prosperous and 

 more powerful neighbors. Thus the land would come to be 

 peopled entirely by men of this more advanced and more intelli- 

 gent type, by a process of selection similar in some respects to 

 that which produced a domestic variety of animal. Even at the 

 present time there are, even in the most civilized communities, 

 reversions to the wild type of man. Criminals of the more 

 bmtal type, anarchists, and even a certain bellicose type of 

 socialist, the whole underworld of revolt in fact, are in 

 rebellion against the restraints and institutions of civilized soci- 

 ety. They are the untamable animals of the human herd. 



Reaction upon civilization. But the transformation was not 

 limited to the character of the individual men ; it affected also 

 their laws and institutions, their religion, and their ideas of 

 morality. One of the first of these changes to occur was the 

 development of a new concept of property. When men began 

 to prize their herds as a source of income and to live off 

 the produce of them, the concept of capital was born. By the 

 concept of capital is meant the idea of a fund of wealth as a 

 source of income, a fund which had to be guarded and pre- 

 served for the sake of . the income, and whose preservation 



