Principles of western civilisation

140 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

stitute the dominant and controlling feature underlying all the details of the upward process of social evolution.

If we turn now and regard closely the nature of the laws governing this process of subordination, as a whole, an important fact respecting it comes into view. It must, of inherent necessity, we perceive, fall into two great eras or epochs. In each of these epochs, moreover, there must be a characteristic ruling principle in the ascendant to which all the details of the development in progress will, in the last resort, stand in subordinate relationship.- If we endeavour to state the ruling principle of the first epoch it may be put briefly into terms as follows :—

Ln the first epoch of soctal development the characteristic and ruling feature is the supremacy of the causes which are contributing to social efficiency by subordinating the individual merely to the existing political organisation.

The conditions which must prevail throughout the whole of this first epoch of social evolution may readily be imagined. From the low level at which the struggle for existence was necessarily waged amongst the earliest groups of men, it was inevitable that under the influence of Natural Selection the kind of social efficiency to which the highest importance would attach in this first stage would be that in which the military subordination of the individual to the group of which he was a member was most complete and efficient. For, we come to see at once that whatever efficiency in any other sense society at this stage might have possessed, it is absolutely certain that if it was not also efficient in a military sense it would in time have dis-