“The human hordes turned upon each other, and their prowlings about the precarious supplies of food evolved in the course of time the ‘wars of civilization.’ There was little peace where nature was most productive, and the conquering populations of the better lands, governing and protecting by conquest, built up whole states on the traditions and practice of fighting.... _Statesmen and philosophers set forth the necessity and beneficence of destruction. It was in such a world, where a man’s death was his neighbor’s gain, that_ OUR _social institutions were grounded_.... Predatory habits, which originated in the hunting of game, developed a zest for hunting men as soon as conquests and the possession of slaves made the agricultural resources of the valleys more desirable than those of the mountain or upland plain.... The contests evolved social institutions, which do perpetuate and conserve, and which do not improve, man’s adjustment to nature. Here arises the distinction between the _social_ institutions ... and the _economic_ institutions.... The former establish status and the rights of possession and exploitation; the other increase nobility of men and goods, promote industry, and give each generation renewed power to establish itself in closer relations with nature. “The result of these conditions is two kinds of obstacles that hinder advance. On the one hand are the obstacles economic, maladjustments between man and _nature_, which forced men in the past to submit to a poverty they did not know how to escape; and on the other hand are the obstacles _social_ which do not originate in nature, but in those _past [social] conditions retaining present potency_ that have aligned men into antagonistic classes at home and into hostile races abroad. The _economic_ obstacles are being slowly weakened by the application of knowledge, science and skill; but the _social_ obstacles will never be overcome until an intellectual revolution shall have freed men’s minds from the stultifying social traditions that hand down hatreds, and shall have given to thought the freedom that now makes industrial activity. _The extension of civilization downward does not depend at present so much upon gaining fresh victories over nature, as it does upon the demolishment of social obstacles which divide men into classes and prevent the universal democracy that unimpeded economic forces would bring about._ The _social_ status, properly determined by a man’s working capacity, has now _intervened between him and his relations with nature_ until OPPORTUNITY, which should be impersonal and self-renewed at the birth of a man, has dwindled and become partisan.”[349]