Anthropologists put the age of the human race roughly at half a million years. In that comparatively long period――long as compared with history, but short as reckoned by geology――man has evolved from an ape-like, tree-dwelling nut-eater into a plodding, illiterate, monosyllabic tiller of the soil, (I take the majority of mankind as representative of its state of progress rather than the _élite_). The 500 millennia of human evolution have had but little effect on the human form and the average human character. The brain is somewhat larger generally and the mouth rather less protruding. The mental equipment of the representative man――the man representing the majority――is in many ways inferior to that of the dog or the ant. He is full of greeds and lusts and superstitions which place him on a level with the higher animal life, or even below it. It is in his possibilities rather than in his actual state of development that man is a superior being. Those possibilities have to some extent been realized in the educated few. When we speak of civilization, of modern life and scientific advance, we fix our attention exclusively on the educated _élite_. In asserting, for instance, that nowadays nobody doubts that the earth is round, we are referring to a very small minority of the human race, composed of perhaps half the adults of Europe and America and Australia, with a small sprinkling of Africans and Asiatics, in all perhaps 10 per cent. of the total population. If a vote were taken of every man, woman, and child in the world to decide whether the earth is flat or round, there would be a majority of perhaps 9 to 1 in favour of a flat earth. Again, “everybody” is supposed to know that a whale is not a fish, that it does not spawn or lay eggs, but that it suckles its young like any other mammalian. What proportion of the human race actually _does_ know that simple fact? How many human beings even know that the sun is larger than the moon? A great many, no doubt, but how many out of the whole race? Scientific knowledge is the birthright of every human child. But on that very account, perhaps, it is neither prized nor cherished. In the markets where thoughts are bought and sold, an ounce of illusion is worth a ton of fact. The enormous disproportion between the amount of knowledge accumulated by the human intelligentsia and the general level of knowledge is productive of many evils and anomalies. It necessarily breeds an attitude of contemptuous superiority towards the uninformed masses, and supplies a temptation to profit by that superiority in order to dominate and oppress the majority. Many wars, strikes, revolutions, and other social crises are the outcome of this anomalous condition. On the other hand, the very existence of empires requires the presence of a great substratum of the half-educated or uncultivated to follow the lead and obey the behests of the Imperial few.