But while the idea of nationality has thus been accentuated, there has
been a never-ending struggle within the bounds of the nation itself to
adjust the relations of one citizen to another. The ideas that might
makes right, that the strong man must dominate the weak, that leadership
in the community properly belongs to the man who is physically most
competent to lead--these ideas were a perfectly natural, and indeed an
inevitable, outgrowth of the conditions under which man fought his way
up through savagery and barbarism. Man in the first period of
civilization inherited these ideas, along with the conditions of society
that were their concomitants. So throughout the periods when the
oriental civilizations of Egypt and Babylonia and Assyria and Persia
were dominant, a despotic form of government was accepted as the natural
order of things. It does not appear that any other form was even
considered as a practicality. A despot might indeed be overthrown, but
only to make way for the coronation of another despot. A little later
the Greeks and Romans modified the conception of a heaven-sent
individual monarch; but they went no further than to substitute a
heaven-favoured community, with specially favoured groups (_Patricii_)
within the community. With this, national egoism reached its climax; for
each people regarded its own citizens as the only exemplars of
civilization, openly branding all the rest of the world as "barbarians,"
fit subjects for the exaction of tribute or for the imposition of the
bonds of actual slavery. During the middle ages there was a reaction
towards individualism as opposed to nationalism: but the entire system
of feudalism, with its clearly recognized conditions of over-lordship
and of vassaldom, gave expression, no less clearly than oriental
despotism and classical "democracy" had done, to the idea of individual
inequality; of divergence of moral and legal status based on natural
inheritance. Thus this idea, a reminiscence of barbarism, maintained its
dominance throughout the first period of civilization.

But gunpowder, marking the transition to the second period of
civilization, came as a great levelling influence. With its aid the
weakest peasant might prove more than a match for the most powerful
knight. Before its assaults the castle of the lord ceased to be an
impregnable fortress. And while gunpowder thus levelled down the power
of the mighty, the printing-press levelled up the intelligenc