ce no other way for the tribal appropriation of
the blessings of regulated fire was possible among talking apes, except
that one individual, or a very few, should assume the office of owner
of the sticks or flints for igniting the fire, and should become
dispenser of the flame. The group thus was divided into the controller
and the controlled, the owner and the owned, the master and the man,
the governor and the governed, the chief and his followers.

XIV. THE TWO MARKS OF ALL CIVILIZATION

Such a differentiation of society was, among apes, the condition for
any sort of social unity; but control by the few could at the first
have been only rudimentary and intermittent. Fire is not everything,
and was indispensable only on certain occasions, as when the group
were caught unexpectedly in some wintry region. Then the choice for
any man might lie between freezing or obeying. Be it observed that
fire under such circumstances would be shared by all, but the power of
social control would be monopolized by one. Had you been there, but
not the mightiest of your group, the condition of your surviving the
cold would have been that you surrendered whatever individual
initiative you had had. You gained fire, but lost freedom. At this
point, by some innate sense of logical identity, my mind is carried
forward a hundred thousand years to that centre of to-day's highest
civilization--Detroit, and to its very palladium, the Ford Motor
Works. For in that far-famed institution is to be found a very
striking similarity to the primeval monopoly of initiative which arose
with the first control of fire. Mr. Henry Ford has been magnanimously
ready to share profits with his men, but, so far as I can learn, no
iota of the industrial control.

Before I go to the next step towards citizenship, I would call
attention to the fact that thus, near to the beginning of things human,
when the use of fire was introduced, we are able to detect the two
distinguishing characteristics of all civilization, and of trade in
particular, which are the sharing by the tribe of the blessings of
man's mastery over Nature, but, as the condition of the sharing, a
monopoly of power and initiative by the few who dispense the blessings.
So much of good and of goods--but no more--could the mass of men enjoy
as was compatible with the continuance of the master's ascendancy over
the men and over the public. We shall find no other than these marks in
all future civi