progress was, therefore, to make more conspicuous the prior inequality of natural conditions.

This increased inequality operated, in turn, to increase the range and extent of warfare. The less fortunate would inevitably combine, and press upon the more fortunate in the proportion that differences obtained between their material conditions.

But while progress thus increased the total amount of warfare, it paradoxically operated at the same time to increase the sum total of peace. For, although it intensified the competition between groups, it secured, by the increased food supply, the enlargement of all groups through the affiliation of smaller groups and the reduction of infanticide. The number living at peace with each other within group limits was thus greater, even though the groups themselves were more liable to war than their earlier and smaller predecessors.

Material progress, then,

Increased the inequalities naturally obtaining between social groups; and thus

Increased the range and extent of warfare; but at the same time.

Increased the sum total of peace by providing an economic basis for the affiliation of smaller groups and the reduction of infanticide.

§ 16. But in a still profounder and more dramatic way did material progress change the direction of the forces operating upon mankind. Primeval warfare was a struggle for extermination; but material progress gradually transformed war into a struggle for domination. Let us carefully notice the situation here developing, for it carries us upward, by a direct and simple route, through the darkness of prehistoric times into the light of ancient history.

Progress in the material arts endowed labor with the power of producing a surplus over immediate needs. In fights, the victors, instead of slaughtering the vanquished indiscriminately, as hitherto, now began to spare life, and

to enslave the vanquished. Along with the rise of slavery came the rise of a ruling and owning class for the one implies the other. In the struggle for existence in the struggle for good locations - the larger, better organized, and more powerful groups conquered and absorbed the smaller, thus producing tribal societies with an upper layer of free families and a lower stratum of slaves. At length, in place of small groups and tribes, there began to appear social bodies of national dignity, composed of associated tribes, permanently settled in favored regions like the valleys of the Nile, the Tigris, and the Euphrates; and the curtain had rolled up on the stage of history. The ancient civilizations come forward through the haze of myth and legend, out of the darkness of prehistoric times, with all the marks of their earlier history strong upon them. They are in possession of rude industrial systems; they are engaged in wars of defense and conquest; and they are stratified into two principal classes, whereof the lower is the property of the upper, in substance if not always in form.

Material progress, then, issued not only in the enlargement of competitive groups, but in the stratification, or cleavage, of these groups primarily on the basis of human slavery.*

$ 17. In illustration of some of these propositions about slavery we draw again upon the great work of Ratzel, which authoritatively describes the many races of

*The essential fact to be noted here is simply the stratification, or cleavage, of enlarging social groups. A correspondent has suggested that we do not make it quite clear just how cleavage is brought about. We are not so particular just here to show how cleavage is produced, as to throw the fact of cleavage itself into relief. We have observed in the text that material progress endowed labor with the power of producing a surplus over immediate needs, and so led to the replace ment of indiscriminate slaughter by capture and slavery. This is the most abstract possible statement of the case. The concrete involutions are not necessarily so simple as the abstract statement seems to indicate. The reader should notice this in the course of our survey of the historic civilizations.

which it treats. The passages reproduced relate to societies below the plane of modern civilization and yet above the level of the Fuegians and Australians noticed in the preceding chapter. We feel like apologizing for introducing so much quoted matter in connection with this point; but, for the general reader at least, it will be well to read the passages carefully.

"The Masai in East Africa, a shepherd tribe, who subsist upon herds of a fixed size, and have neither labor nor provisions to spare for slaves, kill their prisoners [of war]; their neighbors, the agricultural and trading Wakamba, being able to find a use for slaves, do not kill them (1). Nearly allied to slaves are those despised and degraded portions of the population, who live as a sharplyseparated and deep-lying stratum, under a conquering race. Almost every race in Asia or Africa which has made any progress toward higher development embraces some such, not always differing ethnologically. For that very reason, however, the social difference is all the more strictly maintained. " (2).

In such cases cleavage into upper and lower strata is based upon something more than property right in the laborers themselves. Just here, however, it is sufficient for the point that we are trying to make, to keep the attention focused upon slavery, in order to simplify the discussion as much as possible.

"Slavery, which has not much hold among the simpler [Malay] races, is strongly developed among the "town Malays" of Palembang, Acheen, and the like. [Note here again that the more primitive are not so fully stratified into classes]. It affects prisoners of war, malefactors who cannot pay their fines, and other debtors, among them not a few who have gambled away their liberty. Illegitimate children, whether the parents are free or slaves come into this class. As a rule, slaves are treated as members of the household, can buy their freedom, and in practice are not inferior to poor relations who have been taken into the house for the worth of their service (3).

Class-divisions among the Polynesians are, by reason of taboo, as sharp as in the most thorough system of caste. They fall into those which participate in the divine, and those who are wholly excluded from it. The aristocratic principle is seldom carried to such an extreme as here, where a stern psychology remains inexorable even beyond the grave. In Tonga the native people, in contradistiction to the immigrant nobles, are regarded as having no immortal souls; while the souls of nobles return from the next world and inspire those of their own order for the priesthood, so that the connection of the tabooed [i. e, the upper] class with the gods is never interrupted. The boundary between these two classes is not everywhere alike, though the division into chiefs, freemen, or slaves runs through all Polynesia. Of the men of rank the greater number are connected by ties of relationship, the memory of which is preserved by professed genealogists, with the aid of pedigree sticks. The remembrance goes far back. When the palace in Hawaii was dedicated none were admitted save those who were connected with the sovereign in the tenth or some less degree.

In Micronesia, the division into classes is equally into nobles, freemen, and slaves. The first [i. e, the nobles], with the priests, are the most influential.

In East Melanesia the classes correspond with the Polynesian divisions.

(4).

Society among the Hovas [in the large island of Madagascar, east of Africa] falls into three classes; the nobles, the citizens, and the slaves. The nobility consists mostly of the descendants of former chiefs. slaves three kinds are distinguished. are of the same blood as the Hovas.

Of

The first

The most

numerous class are recruited chiefly from prisoners of war; they are slaves in the strictest sense.

. The

third class are Africans, imported by Arabs mostly from the Mozambique coast. Since 1877 the slaves have been nominally [but not actually] free in all parts of the island over which the Hova power extends. The slaves hold a

somewhat lower position than the other members of the family; but may, by the good will of their masters, lead an existence that many a free man would envy.

The Hovas have become great by the power of the sword, and hold their power thereby.

.

(5).

In no part of the earth has slavery attained such vast importance as in Africa. Its chief source is

capture in war.

Every man bears a chain of some sort. It is only chiefs' children who are not liable to slavery. . Beside the slaves whom the Duallas put to live in separate villages of their own, as on the Mungo, and who attend to agriculture, and apart from their own want of freedom are only a little worse off than their masters, one thinks involuntarily of the oasis dwellers of the Central Sahara, subjugated by Tipoo, who tend their lords' date-orchards and share the produce with them.

The southern basin of the Congo in its interior part being a part of Africa as little touched as any by European influences, the observations which have there been made in great number upon slavery and the slave-trade are of double interest. Slavery is beyond question universal there. Even in the Portuguese possessions, where it is formally abolished, it survives; and the 'working classes' are still, as of old, recruited by the purchase of negroes by preference from Mwata Jamvo's country. From the chief slave markets only a few years ago thousands were going westward across the Kasai; and among the indigenous races the Kiotos and Bangala are especially active as traders and leaders of slave-caravans.

(6).

In Southern Arabia a separation of castes has grown up of quite peculiar sharpness. As in other Islamitic countries, a distinction is made into Shereefs, the alleged descendants of the prophet [Mohammed], then ruling families, then Bedouins, who, being fighters, are always valued more highly than the sedentary peasant population. Besides these there are the Akhdams, a term best rendered by 'disreputable classes.' Many industries are