tariffs and the standing armies of the civilized world to-day bear
witness; how difficult it is to get over the idea that it is not theft
to steal from a foreigner, the difficulty in procuring an international
copyright act will show. Can we wonder at the perpetual hostilities of
tribes and clans? Can we wonder that when each community was isolated
from the others--when each, uninfluenced by the others, was spinning its
separate web of social environment, which no individual can escape, that
war should have been the rule and peace the exception? "They were even
as we are."

Now, warfare is the negation of association. The separation of men into
diverse tribes, by increasing warfare, thus checks improvement; while in
the localities where a large increase in numbers is possible without
much separation; civilization gains the advantage of exemption from
tribal war, even when the community as a whole is carrying on warfare
beyond its borders. Thus, where the resistance of nature to the close
association of men is slightest, the counterforce of warfare is likely
at first to be least felt; and in the rich plains where civilization
first begins, it may rise to a great height while scattered tribes are
yet barbarous. And thus, when small, separated communities exist in a
state of chronic warfare which forbids advance, the first step to their
civilization is the advent of some conquering tribe or nation that
unites these smaller communities into a larger one, in which internal
peace is preserved. Where this power of peaceable association is broken
up, either by external assaults or internal dissensions, the advance
ceases and retrogression begins.

But it is not conquest alone that has operated to promote association,
and, by liberating mental power from the necessities of warfare, to
promote civilization. If the diversities of climate, soil, and