Says Wundt:[175] "So long as he is not obliged to protect himself against peoples that crowd in upon him, primitive man is familiar with the weapon only as an implement of the chase. The old picture of a war of all with all, as Thomas Hobbes once sketched the natural state of man, is the very reverse of what obtained. The natural condition is one of peace, unless this is disturbed by external circumstances, one of the most important of which is contact with a higher culture." We remember, also, the fewness of fortified villages in northern Europe until toward the end of the Neolithic period, and then mainly along great routes of migration; and around mines and workshops. They seem to fail altogether in Scandinavia at this time. Even the wars, battles, or quarrels which occurred probably hindered progress far more than they aided it. Haeckel in his younger days was fierce in his denunciations of the stupidity of war. Political or economic revolutions could hardly occur when there was probably little organized government and even less wealth and class difference. Conditions in France may have been somewhat different. Here the great stone monuments suggest a denser population under a more advanced organization, religious or political, or both, reminding us of conditions in the Mediterranean region, with whose culture it was closely connected. Here fortifications seem to have been quite numerous.[176] But our knowledge is too slight to allow even a conjecture. [Illustration: EARLY AGRICULTURE From the mural painting by Fernand Cormon in the Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris.] In the southeastern part of Europe we find the people of the banded pottery who practised an advanced form of agriculture. Here apparently the men as well as the women worked in the fields. We find their stone mattocks and ploughshares. Hoe-culture was giving place to ploughing. Here men were receiving a very different education and training from the hunters, fishermen, and herdsmen of the north, though there also a gradual increase of tillage was doubtless taking place. They were tilling the ground laboriously, monotonously, doing what was wearisome and disagreeable for a reward sometimes large, sometimes scanty. The peasant farmer learns forethought, thrift, economy, industry, and a host of homely virtues, far less known to hunter or herdsman. He is no more a collector taking what he finds: he has gone into partnership with nature. He is studying her ways, moods, and whims. He amasses a steadily increasing store of most valuable lore concerning climate, weather, soil, plants, animals, and things. He is rooted in a little patch of ground. His outlook is narrow and he is slow to change. But he learns his lessons thoroughly. He may enter the school unwillingly but he stays in it.