CONDITIONS OF PROGRESS 



logy that the very state of things which Is pre- 

 eminently useful in bringing men out of sav- 

 agery is also likely to be preeminently in the 

 way of their attaining to a persistently progres- 

 sive civilization. " No one," says Mr. Bagehot, 

 " will ever comprehend the arrested civilizations 

 unless he sees the strict dilemma of early soci- 

 ety. Either men had no law at all, and lived in 

 confused tribes, hardly hanging together, or they 

 had to obtain a fixed law by processes of incred- 

 ible difficulty. Those who surmounted that 

 difficulty soon destroyed all those that lay in 

 their way who did not. And then they them- 

 selves were caught in their own yoke. The cus- 

 tomary discipline, which could only be imposed 

 on any early men by terrible sanctions, contin- 

 ued with those sanctions, and killed out of the 

 whole society the propensities to variation which 

 are the principle of progress." ^ 



Mr. Bagehot shows that this problem has 

 never been successfully solved except where a 

 race, rendered organically law-abiding through 

 some discipline of the foregoing kind, has been 

 thrown into emulative conflict with other races 

 similarly disciplined, — a condition which has 

 been completely fulfilled only in the case of the 

 migrating Aryans who settled Europe. But be- 

 fore we can extricate ourselves from our seeming 

 dilemma, we need to point out, more distinctly 



^ Physics and Politics y p. 57. 



25 



