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But in the midst of this primitive struggle for existence, the beginnings of material art began to effect a revolution. Rising above the animal state, men learned how to make tools of stone and metal; they acquired the use of fire; they domesticated some of the lower animals; they learned to save seeds for planting, and thus laid the foundations of agriculture. Originally, man was compelled, like the animals, to take the outer world as he found it, adapting himself to his physical environment as best he could. But now he learned more and more to adapt his environ. ment to himself by means of art.

The beginnings of material progress, however, did not equalize those natural conditions which produce here plenty, and there scarcity. Those unequal conditions are still in existence. And not only this; but it is a mere plain fact of history that material progress itself has never been the same throughout the world. Some sections of the race have shot ahead. Some have lagged behind. The beginnings of material art, then, multiplied rather than diminished the inequalities obtaining everywhere. Larger numbers of men were able to live together in social groups; but war continued as before. War, however, became less a struggle for extermination, and more a struggle for domination. Material progress endowed labor with the power of producing a surplus over immediate needs; and the victors in war, instead of slaughtering the vanquished indiscriminately as before, now began to spare life and to take captives. Hence, not only did social groups increase in size; they also stratified into two principal classes, upper and lower. The upper class appropriated the labor products of the lower class, and converted these products. largely into social capital of all kinds, material and intangible. It is true that the upper and well-to-do classes have been the greatest beneficiaries of progress thus far; but this has been no fault of the upper class. The inevitable reforms, or adjustments, which will distribute the benefits of progress more widely than at present will necessarily proceed upon the basis of a huge mass of social capital which has been accumulated mostly through the institution of social cleavage. Civilization could arise out of the universal welter of primeval savagery and animalism only as it has; and any scientific treatment of history must bring the facts of history into relation with the phenomena of cleavage.

(1)-SMALL AND VINCENT, Introduction to the Study of Society (N. Y.), pp. 78, 261.

p. 32.

(2) Decennial Publications of the University of Chicago, IV, p. 128. (3)-STUBBS, Constitutional History of England (Oxford, 1875), I,

CHAPTER V.

ORIENTAL CIVILIZATION.

§ 27. In studying the process of social development, we logically turn from prehistoric and barbarian society in general to the ancient world that centered about the eastern end of the Mediterranean sea. Oriental civilization was the first great circle of communities to come forward into the light of history, and, upon the basis of prehistoric beginnings, work out a culture of sufficient power to propagate itself onward in human experience. The leading peoples, or nations, of the ancient oriental world were the Egyptians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Phonicians, and Israelites. The world-historical place of the ancient East is well set forth by Professor James Craig in the following words:

"It is a fact, more and more plainly perceived by scholars, that among the early peoples who have contributed to the ideas inwrought into our present civilization there is none to whom we owe a greater debt than we do to the Semitic family. It is here that we find the earliest beginnings of civilization historically known to us here that early religious ideas, social customs and manners, political organizations, the beginnings of art and architecture, the rise and growth of mythological ideas that have endured and spread to western nations, can be seen and studied in their earliest stages, and here alone information is supplied which enables us to follow them most successfully in their development" (1).

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§ 28. A survey of these peoples as they come forward on the stage of history shows that there was no such distinction of social structures and functions among them

as we find in the latest social theory and practice. The organization of society into definite institutions, industrial, political, religious, domestic, educational, etc., each having its own special function to discharge and giving its own peculiar direction to the human life common to them all this is a modern idea and practice, and was but faintly foreshadowed in the life and thought of oriental civilization. Society develops, like other growing things, from the simple to the complex, from the indefinite to the definite; and we should not be surprised to find that the oriental community was far more primitive, and far less definite in structure, than the social order in which we live. This ancient world was indeed much nearer the prehistoric beginnings than we are commonly inclined to think. We are often reminded that written history supplies only the later part of man's life on the earth; and in a chronological sense this is true. But modern research into the evolution of society has made it clear that historical perspective is determined, not by chronology, but by achievement. Prehistoric ages doubtless embrace a much longer stretch of time than historic ages; but from the standpoint of achievement, prehistoric times contract, while the ages of written history expand. Comparing the achievements of historic times with the results of prehistoric progress, as illustrated by archæology and the life of savage and barbarian tribes, it is evident that the earliest recorded societies are, so to speak, earlier than they seem to be. The social constitution of the Orient was primitive because the Orient was itself a primitive society. Interrogate the ancient East for its own theory of things, and no great scientific thinkers come forward to make answer. Egypt had no Aristotle; Babylonia had no Spencer. Oriental thought was deductive, a priori, primitive. Human thought reflects human life.

If, now, instead of trying to discover some complex plan, or theory, of society whereon our ideas may turn in the study of the earliest historic civilization - if, instead of this, we bear in mind the facts and principles outlined

in previous chapters, the problem will be simplified, and our task will be reduced to workable dimensions. If the present interpretation is correct, oriental society is to be approached primarily from the standpoint of its cleavage into upper and lower strata. It is here that we seem to find a comprehensive clue to a practical study of the facts. § 29. First, let us try to mark off the political forces and institutions, or, rather, that side of oriental life which corresponds to them. We must bear in mind that the comparatively undeveloped condition of this ancient society makes exact discrimination impossible.

In the light of our modern conception of the state as embracing all the people of a given territory, and of government as the agent of such a state, it requires an effort of the imagination to turn backward and realize the true nature of politics in the earlier ages of social evolution. In the ancient East, government was a prerogative of property in men and in the soil, an incidental function of the upper class; and there was no abstract idea of the state at all. In Egypt

"There existed an aristocracy, the nobility, in whose hands lay the government of the towns and of the nomes [provinces] to which they belonged. They sat in the seats of their fathers, the nobility of ancient days,' and they present the best example of a hereditary nobility. Their riches consisted chiefly in landed property, and in their tombs we see [pictures of] long processions of peasant men and women representing the various villages belonging to the deceased" (2).

"The noble class of the Egyptian people had nothing in common with the vulgar mob. To them were committed the highest offices of the court. . The nobles held as their hereditary possessions villages and tracts of land, with the laboring people thereto belonging, bands of servants, and numerous heads of cattle" (3).

In this respect Egypt was typical of all the ancient East. The government of society was everywhere in control of the upper class; and everywhere the upper class

itself was organized into "clans," "houses," or "families." In our survey of the primitive struggle for existence we saw that the earliest social groups naturally formed themselves on the lines of the family. In view of this fact there is nothing strange in the supremacy of the family in the original politics of all historical peoples. Early aristocracy was invariably the outgrowth of the evolution of warring clanships which fused into tribal corporations, and gradually accumulated a lower class of slaves. In settled communities these clans, or families, had been long established, as a rule. In wandering tribes there were always military chiefs who were in process of founding families.

The Israelites furnish good illustrations of houses in process of formation, and of houses already founded. Most of the important characters in the Old Testament literature either belonged to the nobility or worked their way into it. Whether he be a historical person or not, Abraham is a good example of the tribal prince. We are told, in Genesis 14, that he was able to gather and command three hundred and eighteen slaves (inaccurately rendered "servants"), "born in his house." Not having passed from the nomadic to the settled life, he had no landed estates; and his property consisted principally of slaves and cattle. Under these circumstances it was a matter of course that he possessed other valuables, the products of labor. In chapter 13 we read that he was "very rich in cattle, in silver and in gold;" and in chapter 23 we learn that he was able to pay "four hundred shekels of silver, current money with the merchant," for a graveyard. Another person of the same social position was the famous Job, to whom apply the same observations respecting historical reality. In the first chapter of the book bearing his name we learn that "his substance was seven thousand sheep, and three thousand camels, and five hundred yoke of oxen, and five hundred she-asses, and a very great household; so that this man was the greatest of all the children of the east." Of course, the personal labor

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