stence. The brutes have not attained to our complexity of
brain; ideas are only rudimentary with them, and they decide the
question of superiority by rude methods. Two lions fight until one is
laid low; the lioness looks calmly on until the little problem of
superiority is settled, and then she goes off with the victor. The
horses on the Pampas have their set battles until one has asserted his
mastery over the herd, and then the defeated ones cower away abjectly,
and submit themselves meekly to their lord. All the male animals are
given to issuing challenges in a very self-assertive manner, and the
object is the same in every case. But we are far above the brutes; we
have that mysterious, immaterial ally of the body, and our struggles are
settled amid bewildering refinements and subtleties and restrictions. In
one quarter, power of the soul gives its possessor dominion; in another,
only the force of the body is of any avail. If we observe the struggles
of savages, we see that the idea of equality never occurs to
half-developed men; the chief is the strong man, and his authority can
be maintained only by strength or by the influence that strength gives.
As the brute dies out of man, the conditions of life's warfare become so
complex that no one living could frame a generalization without finding
himself at once faced by a million of exceptions that seem to negative
his rule. Who was the most powerful man in England in Queen Anne's day?
Marlborough was an unmatched fighter; Bolingbroke was an imaginative and
masterful statesman; there were thousands of able and strong warriors;
but the one who was the most respected and feared was that tiny cripple
whose life was a long disease. Alexander Pope was as frail a creature as
ever managed to support existence; he rarely had a moment free from
pain; he was so crooked and aborted that a good-hearted woman like Lady
Mary Wortley Montagu was surprised into a sudden fit of laughter when he
proposed marriage to her. Yet how he was feared! The only one who could
match him was that raging giant who wrote "Gulliver," and the two men
wielded an essential power greater than that of the First Minister. The
terrible Atossa, Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, shrank from contact with
Pope, while for a long time the ablest men of the political sets
approached Swift like lackeys. One power was made manifest by the
waspish verse-maker and the powerful satirist, and each was acknowledged
as a sort of