248 COSMIC PHILOSOPHY, [pi. il 



eiderahle step toward civilization is taken when trilDes begin 

 to aggregate for mutual defence over a wide tract of country. 

 When America was discovered, an aggregation of this sort 

 had apparently begun to be formed among the Iroqaois ; and 

 such was the highest organization reached by the ancient 

 Turanian tribes of Central Asia. A far more important step 

 is taken when warfare ceases to be purely destructive and 

 becomes acquisitive; or, in other words, when the victors, 

 instead of massacreing the vanquished, begin to make slaves 

 of them. By this step agricultural industry is fairly brought 

 into existence, and the tribal confederacy becomes fixed in 

 location and enabled to increase indefinitely in size at the 

 expense of the less highly organized communities in the 

 neighbourhood. Under these conditions the tribal con- 

 federacy may grow until it takes on the semblance of an 

 "aggregate of the third order," as in China,^ or in ancient 

 Egypt, Assyria, Media, Lydia, and Persia. I am expressing 

 something more than an analogy- -I am describing a real 

 homology as far as concerns the process of development — 

 when I say that these communities simulated modern Euro- 

 pean nations much in the same way that a tree-fern of the 

 carboniferous period simulated the exogenous trees of the 

 present time. The vast growth and the considerable civi- 

 lization obtained by such communities were rendered possible 

 only through the institution of industrial slavery in place of 

 the primeval indiscriminate slaughter of captives. Only 

 through enforced labour did the continuous culture of the 

 soil and the consequent stability of society become possible ; 



1 " In every respect the Chinese constitution of society may be regarded as 

 a gi.gantic amplification of the constitution of tlie family. The family is no 

 doubt the constituent element of which all societies are composed ; just as, iu 

 the body, all tissues, nervous or muscular, are generated from the primitive 

 cellular tissue ; but whereas in other societies we find differentiation into 

 classes and institutions which have no direct analogue in the family, in China 

 we find far less of this, far more of adherence to the primitive social tissue, 

 to the patriarchal type. On this type the village and the empire are alik< 

 moulded." Bridges, ta Essays on International Polity, p. 401. 



