It was too much to expect that this possibility should be understood by a race which had never before got further than to see that if their family, their town, their nation, was to have ease and plenty, it must be quick to get as much of the world's store of food and goods as it could,--and to acquire them in spite of the fact that the other groups, who were hot after them also, might perish if they did not get their share. They did not see that with the coming of coal the supply was practically unlimited, and so it was not man's sense of brotherhood but his acquisitive instinct, checked and balked for ages, that first found channels of release when coal came. After the coming of coal this acquisitive instinct expanded with cosmic force. For the first time in history, men and nations thrilled with the manifest possibility of their escape from the ancient menace of hunger into a world of measureless plenty. In their greedy rush for possession, men within nations trampled one another under foot, and nations girded themselves for world dominion. And as wealth flowed into the village, the town, and the nation, all men exulted, those who themselves had nothing as well as those who grew rich. For famine still hovered beyond the horizon, and the very presence in the community of an economic surplus, by whomever owned, gave all men a sense of security as though at last they had won the miraculous hoard of their dreams, through the coming of coal. It was inevitable that in this cumulative drive of the acquisitive instinct with the long-sought surplus almost in sight, the attitude of mind established and glorified during the ages when war was the common alternative to hunger, should carry over into factories and mines. The methods of war,--the ruthless sacrifice of part of the community for the benefit of the rest,--were the only methods men understood. The new possibility had arrived but the old habit of mind remained. With the coming of coal and the beginning of the industrial revolution, no one dreamed that the time for the cessation of human sacrifice had arrived. When the mines were first opened, the slave trade still flourished with almost universal sanction. "It is a slight fact," wrote Lecky, "but full of ghastly significance as illustrating the state of feeling at the time, that the ship in which Hawkins sailed on his second expedition to open the English slave trade was called _The Jesus_." This voyage was made a hundred years before the harnessing of coal, but in the middle of the eighteenth century and far into the nineteenth much the same state of feeling widely prevailed. The first miners in Scotland were serfs; the first miners in northern England were bondsmen who sold themselves by the year and were forbidden by law to leave the mine to which they were bound.