Romance of the Hobbesian War 163 



extermination, or else they fled from each other in 

 order to avoid all contact.^ 



And in a more recent work, Ratzenhofer adds: 



Peaceful relations between the societies were for a 

 long time impossible. Those groups which belonged 

 to different races and to different civilizations avoided 

 all contact as being injurious. When societies had 

 neighbouring habitations, their relationships easily 

 became very acute. The mutual political relations 

 resembled a game of chess in which the object was for 

 the ones that were best informed to seize quickly the 

 opportune moment to fall upon the neighbour and 

 subjugate him. ^ 



It is necessary to repeat that this anthropo- 

 logical romance, like that of primitive slavery, is 

 made out of the whole cloth of pure mental 

 speculation. No witness was present two hundred 

 thousand years ago to describe the conduct of the 

 human tribes, and when we examine such evidence 

 as we have, and apply logic and common sense 

 to the problem, Ratzenhofer' s imaginary process 

 seems to be very far from the probabilities. 



In general, we have three means of obtaining 

 information concerning primitive man. One is 

 the body of biological and geological facts, from 

 which we may infer the nature of primitive man 

 and the conditions under which he lived. A 



' Wesen und Zweck der Poliiik, Leipsic, Brockhaus, 1903, 

 p. 9. 



' Sociologische Erkentniss, p. 288. 



