But these great civilisations dominated by pastoral antecedents have no grave significance for the modern culture, except as drawbacks, and none at all for modern technology or for that matter-of-fact knowledge on which modern technology runs. The Western peoples, whose cultural past is of more immediate interest, have also had their warlike experience, late and early, but it seems never to have reached the consummate outcome to be seen in the East. Neither as regards the scale on which dynastic organisation has been carried out nor as regards the thoroughness with which their institutions have been permeated by predatory preconceptions have the Western peoples in their earlier history approached the standard of the oriental despotisms. Even now, it may be remarked, advocates of war and armaments commonly speak (doubtless disingenuously) for the predatory régime as being a necessity of defence rather than something to be desired on its own merits. Not that the predatory régime has not been a sufficiently grave fact in the history of occidental civilisation; to take such a view of history one would have to overlook the Roman Empire, the barbarian invasions, the feudal system, the Catholic church, the Era of statemaking, and the existing armed neutrality of the powers; but these have, all but the last, proved to be episodes on a grand scale rather than such an historical finality as any one of the successive monarchies in the Mesopotamian-Chaldæan country,--the test being that occidental civilisation has not died of any one of these maladies, though it has come through more than one critical period. Western civilisation has gone through these eras of accentuated predation and has at all times shown an appreciable admixture of predatory conceptions in its scheme of institutions and ideals, in its domestic institutions and its public affairs, in its art and religion, but it is after all within the mark to say that, at least since the close of the Dark Ages, a distinctive characteristic that sets off this civilisation in contradistinction from any definitively predatory phase of the pecuniary culture, has been a pertinacious pursuit of the arts of peace, to which those peoples that have led in this civilisation have ever returned at every respite. For an appreciation of the relations subsisting between the sense of workmanship and the discipline of habituation in the modern culture, therefore, the phenomena of peaceful ownership are of greater, or at least of more vivid interest than those of the predatory phase of the pecuniary culture.