THE CANNIBAL IN EVOLUTION 179 



advance to view in imagination many a rigid and ethically- 

 set incestuous solitary male retiring indignantly before 

 the flood of immoral innovation into the darkest backwoods 

 of the primeval forest. Had he been capable of such 

 reasoning, he would have regarded the processes which led to 

 progress and the evolution of the brain man now possesses 

 as essentially anarchic, morbid, and diseased, just as the 

 over-conservative mind of modern times regards the rise 

 of new powers and processes in social polity as tending to 

 the death of the organism of which it is a static and satisfied 

 part. It is, then, no fanciful analogy which suggests that 

 politics are but a chapter in anthropology, and that the 

 processes seen in both are mutually illuminating. We may 

 infer that as such new forces exhaust themselves in altered 

 or adapted or entirely new structures, which in their turn 

 must pass away, cannibalism itself died out among the races 

 we call civilized when organization had reached such a 

 pitch that the labours of pastoralism or agriculture pro- 

 mised earlier and better results than predatory war. A 

 balance of power, continually upset and restored, came into 

 existence, and the developing germ of international law 

 or custom took on new forms. We can thus conceive 

 Grotius and his followers as the lineal descendants of the 

 first ancient inter-group messengers, or at the least derived 

 from the calmer philosophers at the first peace conference 

 ever held about some long-extinguished camp-fire over 

 which the retreating ice of successive glacial epochs has 

 poured its floods. 



It seems not altogether impossible that this hypothesis 

 may be confirmed by the aid of another branch of science. 

 Some years ago it was suggested by an eminent zoologist, 

 one of the few to whom knowledge has not meant special- 

 ism, that the evolution of Tcenia solium supported such 



