CH. XX.] CONDITIONS OF PROGRESS. 273 



regarded as such. Hence in an early community, the enforce- 

 ment of absohite uniformity of belief and practice must 

 establish a kind of natural selection tending to weed out all 

 superior flexibility of mind. As a direct result the community 

 closes up a prolific source of military superiority in the 

 shape of individual political and military genius ; for meu 

 of the Themistokles type are not produced, as a rule, in such 

 states of society. The indirect result will be more fully 

 appreciated when the next chapter has shown us how closely 

 mental flexibility is implicated with that power of represent- 

 ing objects and relations remote from sense which also 

 underlies the invaluable power of anticipating future emer- 

 gencies. To weed out superior flexibility of mind is to 

 check further development in forethought or longheadedness, 

 — a truth of which the entire history of the Oriental com- 

 munities, so unlike each other in many respects, is one long 

 and reiterated confirmation. Still further, when we recall 

 the patent fact that the efficiency of any community is 

 measured by the efficiency of its individual members, and 

 that this efficiency is kept up by a kind of natural selection 

 wliich is none the less potent for not working with the death- 

 penalty as among lower animals, we shall realize how great 

 is the military advantage entailed by free variation and com- 

 petition. In illustration of all this we may recur to a 

 historical event already cited for other purposes. When the 

 Mede, whose laws were quoted as the very type of unchange- 

 ableness, sought to add to his overgrown dominions the 

 modest patrimony of the Athenian, of whom it was said 

 that he was ever curious after new and unheard-of things, 

 the wager of battle resulted in no doubtful verdict. When 

 it is ask(^-d how IMiltiades, with his ten thousand, could so 

 quickly put to flight Datis, with his hundred thousand, the 

 unhesitating reply is that the result was due to the superior 

 social organization under which the ten thousand were reared. 

 But this superiority of organization consisted mainly in the 

 VOL. II. T 



