onflicts of this local experiment in
social organization with that. Through all the historical period these
two well-defined classes of gentle and simple acted and reacted upon
each other, every individual in each class driven by that same will to
live and do, that imperative of self-establishment and aggression that
is the spirit of this world. Until the coming of gunpowder, the man on
horseback--commonly with some sort of armour--was invincible in battle
in the open. Wherever the land lay wide and unbroken, and the great
lines of trade did not fall, there the horseman was master--or the
clerkly man behind the horseman. Such a land was aristocratic and tended
to form castes. The craftsman sheltered under a patron, and in guilds in
a walled town, and the labourer was a serf. He was ruled over by his
knight or by his creditor--in the end it matters little how the
gentleman began. But where the land became difficult by reason of
mountain or forest, or where water greatly intersected it, the pikeman
or closer-fighting swordsman or the bowman could hold his own, and a
democratic flavour, a touch of repudiation, was in the air. In such
countries as Italy, Greece, the Alps, the Netherlands, and Great
Britain, the two forces of the old order, the aristocrat and the common
man, were in a state of unstable equilibrium through the whole period of
history. A slight change[22] in the details of the conflict for
existence could tilt the balance. A weapon a little better adapted to
one class than the other, or a slight widening of the educational gap,
worked out into historically imposing results, to dynastic changes,
class revolutions and the passing of empires.

Throughout it was essentially one phase of human organization. When one
comes to examine the final result, it is astonishing to remark the small
amount of essential change, of positively final and irreparable
alteration, in the conditions of the common life. Consider, for example,
how entirely in sympathy was the close of the eighteenth century with
the epoch of Horace, and how closely equivalent were the various social
aspects of the two periods. The literature of Rome was living reading in
a sense that has suddenly passed away, it fitted all occasions, it
conflicted with no essential facts in life. It was a commonplace of the
thought of that time that all things recurred, all things circled back
to their former seasons; there was nothing new under the sun. But now
almost