As I came to feel the spirit of their existence, these arguments grew self-evident; I saw how all-important to progress were these intervals of isolation. They had studied with the minutest care and ultimate shuddering the features of their old civilisation, and they had found that the worst of them came from the associative principle in the training of youth. Atavism became their greatest horror; in the breast of every child born into civilised life an embryo savage is born, and this had been vitalised and fostered by sympathy with what was savage in companions and schoolmates. Under their old school and university systems the age of training was that which corresponded to the military stage in the development of man; and boys were for ever fighting, girls ever encouraging to fight; emulation became fierce rivalry and hatred. A crude stage of the past was confirmed and perpetuated through life by constant association in the time of life that stood for it. That was why their leisured classes had so devoted themselves during peace to the wilder sports of the hunting stage of mankind, whilst they were ever itching for war that their sons might distinguish themselves. That was why they had indulged so often in breaches of the marriage bond, and outraged the monogamy that they professed to revere; the minds of the youth had been inflamed by the free proximity of the sexes before the passions had been mastered, before the polygamous and unmoral stage of their career had been passed through. And education, instead of checking the perpetuation of these immaturities, encouraged it. Teachers had come to pride themselves in the development of these savage stages of boyhood and girlhood, and called the weaknesses by euphemistic names, pluck, pride, grace. The young men and women were taught to glory in them. And thus evil became eternal. In more primitive life, there had been of necessity a wiser method of training. There were no large centres of population where their youth was massed in schools and universities. Families wandered or rested by themselves; and the hardships of existence ensured the survival of the few that were fittest. These few had from their earliest years to join their elders in their pursuits, and they learned in such society to pass rapidly through the primitive stages of man’s development, emulating the skill of their betters and following them with modesty and reverence. In the later industrial and centralistic ages the youth had to be massed educationally, and by the mutual encouragement of sympathy came to glory in their immaturities as perfections, and desired to prolong the savage stage of their life into later years. They judged their elders by false and atavistic standards and so lost their modesty and reverence. It was only an occasional wave of lofty feeling issuing from some inspired poet or prophet that raised one generation above the preceding. For centuries and centuries they stood still or retrograded.