The increase and concentration of force in their island was one of the great subordinate aims of their civilisation. For they knew that the greater the power they had command of the more rapidly could they advance towards higher and higher goals. Greater force meant greater dominion over nature and her secrets and laws; and this implied accelerated speed in progress. It had been one of the primitive blunders of their civilisation, as it still was of all other civilisations, to imagine that extended empire over men meant a true development of humanity; wide sovereignty was mere artificial change of the locality and application of the forces of mankind, without increasing them; it was but a reshuffling of the cards (to use your similes), with all the honours in one hand instead of being distributed over all; it was merely political and not real. Any gain that might come from the concentration of power and wealth was wasted on increased war-material and military expeditions for retaining or subduing territories and peoples, on futile and routine administration, and on growth of court splendour and luxury. The pursuit of the sanguinary phantom of power over other men had to be for ever abandoned before any real human advance could be made. Empire over the powers of nature was the primary condition of full development of human possibilities, and every tissue of their wonderful brains was strained to its utmost for the rapid extension of this sway. A new addition to the stores of the centre of force, a new source of energy, was therefore ever hailed by them as the warranty of a leap upward and onward into the future. The invention of these new engines, then, had no slight significance as events in their history. And the assurance of more and more rapid progress was increased by a discovery of the chemic families in the same direction. They had used coal for the generation of heat before they had left their primeval home around the south pole. But in their more tropical archipelago they found no coal-beds, the islands having originated in volcanic and coral formation; and the climate made the use of such a concentrated fuel unnecessary; it was warm even in winter, and it supplied fruits and cereals which needed little cooking. The forests of the islands had furnished whatever fuel had been required for hundreds of generations, and outside of Limanora they were still sufficient for all purposes. But the centre of force had recalled the great heat they used to have from coal, and the Leomo, in their probings of the earth, had ever been on the outlook for beds of the old fuel. Recently they had found thin strata of it, but so deep in the earth that it was of little value to them.