Professor Sumner is gone, but he has left behind him an army of pupils, and I will protect myself against them by phrasing my statement with extreme care. I do not mean to say that man first secures himself completely against his enemies, and then goes out to hunt for a meal. Of course he has to eat while he is countering the moves of his enemies; he has to eat while he is on the march to battle, or in flight from it. But ask yourself this question: which would you choose, if you had to choose--to go a couple of days with nothing to eat, or to have your throat cut by bandits and your wife and children carried away into slavery? Certainly you would do your fighting first, and meantime you would scratch together any food you could. While you were devoting your energies to putting down civil war, or to making a treaty with other tribes, or to preparing for a military campaign, you would continue to get food in the way your ancestors had got it; in other words, your economic evolution would wait, while your political evolution proceeded. But when you had succeeded in putting down your enemies, and had a long period of peace before you, then you would plant some fields, and domesticate some animals, or perhaps discover some new way of weaving cloth--and so your industrial life would make progress. It is easy to see why Professor Sumner wished to confuse this issue. He could not deny political evolution, because it had happened. He despised and feared political democracy, but it was here, and he had to speak politely to it, as to a tiger that had got into his house. But industrial democracy was a thing that had not yet happened in the world; it was only a hope and a prophecy, and therefore a prize old Tory was free to ridicule it. I remember reading somewhere his statement--the notion that democracy had anything to do with industry, or could in any way be applied to industry, was a piece of silliness. So, of course, he sought to demolish my idea that there was a process of evolution in economic affairs, paralleling the process of political evolution which had already culminated in democracy. Let us consider the process of political evolution, briefly and in its broad outlines. Take any savage tribe; you find it composed of individuals who are very much alike. Some are a little stronger than others, a little more clever, more powerful in battle; but the difference is slight, and when the tribe chooses someone to lead them, they might as well choose one man as another. They all have a say in the tribe councils, both men and women; their "rights" in the tribe are the same. They are, of course, slaves to ignorance, to degrading superstition and absurd taboos; but these things apply to everyone alike, there is no privileged caste, no hereditary inequality.