The central fact of history, from a psychological point of view, may be said to be the gradual enlargement of social consciousness and rational coöperation. The mind constantly, though perhaps not regularly, extends the sphere within which it makes its higher powers valid. Human nature, possessed of ideals moulded in the family and the commune, is ever striving, somewhat blindly for the most part, with those difficulties of communication and organization which obstruct their realization on a larger scale. Whether progress is general or not we need not now inquire; it is certain that great gains have been made by the more vigorous or fortunate races, and that these are regarded with emulation and hope by many of the others. Throughout modern European history, at least, there has been an evident extension of the local areas within which communication and coöperation prevail, and, on the whole, an advance in the quality of coöperation as judged by an ideal moral unity. It has tended to become more free and human, more adequately expressive of communal feeling. Perhaps all apparent departures from this tendency may plausibly be explained as cases of irregular growth. If we find that vast systems of discipline, like the Roman Empire, have broken down, we find also that these systems were of a low type, psychologically, that the best features of them were after all preserved, and that the new systems that arose, though perhaps less in extent, were on the whole a higher and fuller expression of human nature. In the later Empire, for example, it seems plain that social mechanism (in its proper kind and measure one of the conditions of freedom) had grown in such a way as to shackle the human mind. In order to achieve and maintain an imperial reach of control, the state had gradually been forced to take on a centralized bureaucratic structure, which left the individual and the local group no sphere of self-reliant development. Public spirit and political leadership were suppressed, and the habit of organized self-expression died out, leaving the people without group vitality and as helpless as children. They were not, in general, cowards or voluptuaries—it seems that the decline of courage and domestic morals has been exaggerated—but they had no trained and effective public capacity. Society, as Professor Dill says, had been elaborately and deliberately stereotyped.