Imaginary wars and battles -- Fiction; Nuclear warfare -- Fiction; War stories
Very slowly did man increase his demand upon the illimitable wealth of
Power that offered itself on every hand to him. He tamed certain
animals, he developed his primordially haphazard agriculture into a
ritual, he added first one metal to his resources and then another,
until he had copper and tin and iron and lead and gold and silver to
supplement his stone, he hewed and carved wood, made pottery, paddled
down his river until he came to the sea, discovered the wheel and made
the first roads. But his chief activity for a hundred centuries and
more, was the subjugation of himself and others to larger and larger
societies. The history of man is not simply the conquest of external
power; it is first the conquest of those distrusts and fiercenesses,
that self-concentration and intensity of animalism, that tie his hands
from taking his inheritance. The ape in us still resents association.
From the dawn of the age of polished stone to the achievement of the
Peace of the World, man’s dealings were chiefly with himself and his
fellow man, trading, bargaining, law-making, propitiating, enslaving,
conquering, exterminating, and every little increment in Power, he
turned at once and always turns to the purposes of this confused
elaborate struggle to socialise. To incorporate and comprehend his
fellow men into a community of purpose became the last and greatest of
his instincts. Already before the last polished phase of the stone age
was over he had become a political animal. He made astonishingly
far-reaching discoveries within himself, first of counting and then of
writing and making records, and with that his town communities began to
stretch out to dominion; in the valleys of the Nile, the Euphrates, and
the great Chinese rivers, the first empires and the first written laws
had their beginnings. Men specialised for fighting and rule as soldiers
and knights. Later, as ships grew seaworthy, the Mediterranean which
had been a barrier became a highway, and at last out of a tangle of
pirate polities came the great struggle of Carthage and Rome. The
history of Europe is the history of the victory and breaking up of the
Roman Empire. Every ascendant monarch in Europe up to the last, aped
Cæsar and called himself Kaiser or Tsar or Imperator or Kasir-i-Hind.
Measured by the duration of human life it is a vast space of time
between that first dynasty in Egypt and the coming of the aeroplane,
but by the scale that looks back to the makers of the eoliths, it is
all of it a story of yesterday.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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