The great difference which divides the social organisation of the modern progressive peoples from that of all the ancient European civilisations is that, under it, the individual enjoys greater liberty and more securely founded rights as against the community, and as against all other individuals. This change is summed up in Sir H. Maine’s dictum that “the movement of progressive societies has hitherto been a movement from status to contract.” All the ancient civilised societies, Greece and Rome no less than all the others, rested upon the fundamental assumption of the absolute supremacy of the State, the assumption that the individual existed only for the State and that the welfare of the State was the supreme end to which all individual rights and liberties must be subordinated absolutely, was the end to the securing of which all custom, and all law, all social and family relations and institutions and religion itself were but the means. And the State was a politico-religious organisation, membership of which implied the blood-relationship of its citizens and a common participation in the state-religion; while the State gods were conceived as being themselves ancestors, or in some other way kinsmen, of the citizens[146]. This bond of blood or kinship between the members of the State and its gods went back to the earliest times. It is the rule of almost all savage peoples; and the religious rites of many include some rite symbolising or renewing this blood bond, such as smearing the blood of the kinsmen on the altars of the gods, or drinking the blood of some animal which is held to be the symbolic representative of the god. And the supreme end of the State itself was the increase of its own power and stability, through the exercise of military power and through military conquest. All human beings outside the State, outside this moral-politico-religious-bond, were regarded as _prima facie_ enemies of the State, without rights of any sort, without even the slightest claim to humane treatment. Hence, in war the slaughter of the conquered was the rule; and the practice of making slaves of prisoners of war and of conquered peoples only arose through its profitableness, and was regarded as a great concession to the victims, whose natural fate was sudden death. Under this system, which inevitably became to some extent a caste system, with a caste of freemen or citizens ruling over slaves, each individual was born to a certain status as a member of a particular family. His position and duties and rights in the family were rigidly prescribed by custom, and the law took account only of the relations of the family to the State. CHAPTER XX THE PROGRESS OF NATIONS IN THEIR MATURITY