In yet another way (perhaps more important than any other) the abolition of caste may favour development. In an earlier chapter I pointed out how every step in the development of the intellectual or the moral tradition of a people is initiated by some person of exceptional intellectual or moral power. I pointed out also how the existence of a hierarchy of social classes which are not exclusive castes, together with the operation of the social ladder by means of which individuals and families are enabled to climb up and down the social scale, tend to the segregation of ability in the classes of the upper part of the scale. They tend, in short, to produce classes capable of producing in each generation a relatively large number of persons of more than average capacities. Or, in other words, they lead to the concentration and mutual enrichment of the strains of exceptional capacity; they concentrate the best capacities of the people in a relatively small number of individuals of the favoured classes. And abilities so concentrated and raised in a certain proportion of individuals to a higher power will be more favourable in every way to the growth of the national mind than the same sum of abilities more evenly diffused throughout the population. At present it is impossible to say how far this segregation of abilities has gone, and what part it has played in forwarding the mental development of any nation. But that it has played some part, perhaps a very important one in some instances, can hardly be doubted[149]. In Europe the feudal system served to tide over the period of transition from the ancient social organisation founded on caste and the supremacy of the politico-religious State to the modern system, the transition from the system founded on status and regulated by custom to the system founded upon equality and liberty and regulated by contract. For the feudal system, although still more or less a caste system, was nevertheless founded to some extent on contract. The tenure of land involved a contract to perform services in return; and such contract was the essence of the feudal system. But it was not until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the feudal system was finally broken up and the Reformation initiated the age of religious tolerance, that the modern system substantially replaced the ancient system, and the age of rapid progress set in.