74 THE FALL OF NEW FRANCE 
progress, because it is impossible to secure concerted 
action on a large scale, and so the powers of men are 
frittered away in labours which tend toward no com- 
mon result. The initial difficulty in civilizing a sav- 
age world is to get a large number of its savages to 
work together, for generation after generation, in ac- 
cordance with some general system, for the subjuga- 
tion of surrounding savages and the establishment of 
a permanent community. Unless some such long- 
enduring concert of action can be secured, a settled 
form of civilization cannot be attained; but the his- - 
tory of such a country—as in the case of ancient 
North America — will be an endless series of trivial 
and useless wars. The nations which in early times 
have become civilized and peaceful have become so 
through the military superiority which the power of 
permanently concerted action entails; but this great 
advantage has generally been attended by a disadvan- 
tage. In most of these early civilized nations the 
forces which tend to make the whole community 
think and act alike have been so far encouraged that 
the result has been absolute despotism. Not political 
and ecclesiastical despotism simply, but underlying 
these a social despotism which in course of time 
moulds all the members of the community upon the 
same model, so that their characters become monoto- 
nously alike. The chief types of this kind of civiliza- 
tion are China and ancient Egypt, but all the civilized 
nations of Asia have been characterized by this sort 
of despotism. The result, of course, is immobility. 
When the whole community has come to think and 
feel and behave in the same way, every expression of 
dissent, every attempt at innovation, is at once crushed 
