First checked by the Beginnings of Industrial Civilization.
But presently man's superior intelligence came into play in such wise
that other and better methods of getting food were devised. When in
intervals of peace men learned to rear flocks and herds, and to till the
ground, and when they had further learned to exchange with one another
the products of their labour, a new step, of most profound significance,
was taken. Tribes which had once learned how to do these things were not
long in overcoming their neighbours, and flourishing at their expense,
for agriculture allows a vastly greater population to live upon a given
area, and in many ways it favours social compactness. An immense series
of social changes was now begun. Whereas the only conceivable bond of
political combination had heretofore been blood-relationship, a new
basis was now furnished by territorial contiguity and by community of
occupation. The supply of food was no longer strictly limited, for it
could be indefinitely increased by peaceful industry; and moreover, in
the free exchange of the products of labour, it ceased to be true that
one man's interest was opposed to another's. Men did not at once
recognize this fact, and indeed it has not yet become universally
recognized, so long have men persisted in interpreting the conditions of
industrial life in accordance with the immemorial traditions of the time
when the means of subsistence were strictly limited, so that one man's
success meant another's starvation. Our robber tariffs--miscalled
"protective"--are survivals of the barbarous mode of thinking which
fitted the ages before industrial civilization began. But although the
pacific implications of free exchange were very slowly recognized, it is
not the less true that the beginnings of agriculture and commerce marked
the beginnings of the greatest social revolution in the whole career of
mankind. Henceforth the conditions for the maintenance of physical life
became different from what they had been throughout the past history of
the animal world. It was no longer necessary for men to quarrel for
their food like dogs over a bone; for they could now obtain it far more
effectively by applying their intelligence to the task of utilizing the
forces of inanimate nature; and the due execution of such a task was in
no wise assisted by wrath and contention, but from the outset was rather
hindered by such things.
Such were the beginnings of industrial civilization. Out of its
exigencies, continually increasing in complexity, have proceeded,
directly or indirectly, the arts and sciences which have given to modern
life so much of its interest and value. But more important still has been
the work of industrial civilization in the ethical field. By furnishing
a wider basis for political union than mere blood-relationship, it
greatly extended the area within which moral obligations were recognized
as binding. At first confined to the clan, the idea of duty came at
length to extend throughout a state in which many clans were combined
and fused, and as it thus increased in generality and abstractness, the
idea became immeasurably strengthened and ennobled. At last, with the
rise of empires, in which many states were brought together in pacific
industrial relations, the recognized sphere of moral obligation became
enlarged until it comprehended all mankind.