Principles of western civilisation

vI THE ASCENDENCY OF THE PRESENT 161

community or of the State are joined; but in which outsiders cannot participate without sacrilege. This is the central idea in all the religious systems of the ancient world. It is from it that the conception of exclusive citizenship—the fundamental fact of the Greek and Roman civilisations—proceeds. It is the ruling idea to which, in the last resort, all the life and institutions of the social systems of the ancient world were related. What, therefore, is the significance of this conception of exclusive citizenship, “altogether moralreligious in its nature,” in that epoch of history in which the development of society under the controlling principle of military efficiency is about to culminate ?

Almost the first point which occupies attention in such an inquiry is the fact that the fundamental conceptions underlying the institution of citizenship in the ancient civilisations were not, as may readily be imagined, in any way peculiar to the early Greek and Latin communities. They were conceptions associated with an organisation of society which was common at the time to a vast number of similar communities spread over wide territories in Europe and Asia. They were conceptions which had doubtless persisted for an immense period of time, and they appear to have characterised at one stage the history of all the races from which have been descended the peoples that in modern times have come to play a leading part on the stage of the world. They have, beyond doubt, some vital significance in relation to the principle of overmastering efficiency in the present which governs the first of the two

eras of social evolution described in the last chapter. M