WAS PRIMITIVE MAN A MODERN SAVAGE? 545 



the landowner. The priest in a community so situated would occupy 

 a higher position than the warrior. Kemoved from strife and pro- 

 tected from attack, the early type of religion would develop a beneficent 

 view of the Deity. Monism in some monotheistic shape would become 

 the dominant and interpretative but not the exclusive form of national 

 faith, because an homogeneous concentric national growth would long 

 maintain the supremacy of the central shrine. Government would be 

 benign. Conquest would not be its chief object, because about and 

 without would be no tempting object of attack. The arts would flourish 

 and it might easily be that some Sheikh el Beled, such as now stands in 

 wood at Cairo, or some scribe and architect, such as sat at Tellah and 

 now sits in the Louvre, would surprise us by an achievement in sculp- 

 ture which later generations were not destined to equal. This is not 

 only possible, as an hypothesis, if an empty earth spread an elastic 

 zone about each favored and favorite nidus of civilization, but I unhesi- 

 tatingly appeal to every student of the early stages of Babylonian, 

 Egyptian, Arabian, and Chinese civilization if the development which 

 I have sketched does not more nearly meet the known and recorded 

 facts of the dawn of the history of each than does the assumption that 

 a savage possessing the culture of the Papuan or the negro was slowly 

 prepared by perpetual tribal war, by brutal sexual relations, and by 

 terror-stricken superstition for the upward ascent of man. 



In due time, it is true, the elastic zone would be taken up by the 

 increase of population, external and internal. War and conquest 

 would come. The structure of the state would be remodeled. The 

 warrior king would move to the head of the state and exercise the 

 despotic direction of its affairs. Earlier liberties would disappear. 

 Arts and industries would deteriorate. The national religion would 

 divide into polytheistic conceptions. It would gain in ferocity and 

 organization and lose in elevation and ethical character exactly as 

 would the community itself. With conflict and conquest slavery and 

 polygamy would play a larger share in the national life. The dangers 

 and debauch of war would stimulate superstition. The militant would 

 succeed the industrial type of society. In short, there would come the 

 precise deterioration in the national activities, conscience, and con- 

 sciousness which is perceptible in both Babylonia and Egypt as outer 

 contrast begins. In the present state of our knowledge, in which the 

 dim perspective of centuries too often crowds together in our discus- 

 sion dates widely disparate, it is not possible definitely to determine the 

 precise time of this change, but that some such downward movement 

 occurs in both countries somewhere between and about three thousand 

 five hundred to two thousand five hundred years before Christ, no one 

 will ; I think, be inclined to deny. As the earth fills also about these 

 early centers, there begins to fall on their records the pressure of pos- 

 sible or actual conquest from without. New cruelties appear, a lower 

 moral temper and blunted morality, with a host of those superstitious 

 SM 96 35 



