224 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES 
industry, or try to predict its future, it may be well to cast our eyes back 
over some of the main stages in its evolution. This is the easier to do 
because on each of the main steps of the ladder some part of the human race 
has been left standing—providing a living relic of what was once perhaps 
the most advanced type of economic life. 
We have indeed—in Australia, in Ceylon, in Africa and elsewhere (and 
often under conditions quite favourable to agriculture)—remnants of 
those peoples who refused to become either tillers of the soil like Cain, 
or keepers of sheep like Abel. With them—women and children as well 
as men—life consists of an unremitting food-quest. Their dietary in- 
cludes articles like grass seeds, insect grubs, mice and snakes, yet they 
are often reduced to hunger and famine. They must wander over wide 
areas to secure their meagre fare and they have neither time nor energy 
to spare for the arts of civilisation. It is worth noting that their funda- 
mental disability is a lack neither of intelligence nor of manual dexterity, 
but of foresight. ‘They cannot see beyond their immediate necessities. 
They will work for a daily wage but not for a yearly harvest. The Bush- 
ment of South-West Africa, for example, can be trained to become capable 
herdsmen, but they never become independent stock-farmers because 
they cannot resist the temptation to kill when they are hungry. 
When men first began clearly to anticipate their material needs, and to 
plan ahead in order that these might be supplied, they naturally strove to 
bring under control those species of plants or animals on which, in their 
earlier unplanned economy, they had been accustomed to rely. ‘Thus 
the big-game hunters of the Asiatic plains became, in course of genera- 
tions, nomadic herdsmen. In the flood valleys of the Nile and Euphrates 
unaided nature solved what has elsewhere been the chief problem of the 
cultivator—the maintenance of the fertility of the soil—and there the 
greatest of our early civilisations were founded upon an assured supply of 
corn. But the herdsmen who have become nothing more have con- 
demned themselves to a very limited and an insecure existence. They 
may build up immense capital in the form of live stock, but they still 
live in tents and subsist entirely on meat and milk or, like the Massai, 
on blood and milk; and a drought or an epidemic of stock disease may 
reduce them, in a few weeks, from a state of plenty to one of famine. 
Again the cultivators who have clung to plant life alone as a means of 
sustenance maintain, except in specially favourable localities, but an in- 
conclusive war with nature. On the one hand, the maintenance of soil 
fertility without animal manure has been usually, until the recent intro- 
duction of other fertilisers, a nearly insoluble problem; hence land, 
becoming exhausted after a few years of tillage, has had to be again 
abandoned until such time as natural processes should restore its fertility. 
The periodic clearing of new areas, added to the routine operations of 
tillage and both carried out by means of primitive hand tools, give a very 
real meaning to the curse of Cain. Finally, a purely vegetable diet, 
often restricted to one or two specially productive plants, may be not 
only monotonous but seriously deficient in nutritive value. 
The contriving of a system of mixed farming, embracing both plants 
and animals, was a remarkable stage in the progress of civilisation. It 
