The Limanorans looked back to that stage of their development with a shudder, so far in the mists and darkness of animalism did it seem. Now one man of them was more able to do battle with nature and her fecundity and her catastrophes than a hundred thousand of that olden time, and not one hundred-thousandth of the generative power was needed. Then but a poor fraction of the life-energy could be given up to education. The offspring had to be trained in masses or have no training at all. The parents were too busy earning the means of life to mould their families, and had too many children to give heed to the character of the individual. All the offspring were handed over to professional trainers, who managed them in the mass, and who had to work by the methods of nature with its myriad children through the law of the survival of the fittest. They had to be handled like armies, and the stricter the discipline, the better the result was supposed to be; and where the people were counted in masses and moved in masses the better it undoubtedly was for the survival of the state. Schools and universities were a necessity of that far-back stage of civilisation; they were the drill-sergeants of civil life, dragooning the young and their ideas into accordance with the prevailing and accepted type. Too much independence of character or thought or manner would have broken the ranks and endangered the existence of the commonweal. But the chief purpose of life on the world, the progress of the species, was ignored in this devotion to mere persistence of the species. All variant germs and elements that nature supplies in every individual it brings forth were smoothed down or annihilated into uniformity. The type persisted from century to century unchanged. Only by stealth or by audacity did any new or alien element succeed in modifying the species; and when it did succeed the modification was as often retrograde as progressive. Therefore, in order to be secure from variation, public opinion punished all habits that would lead to independence of character or thought or feeling.