waging chronic warfare alike with powerful beasts and with rival tribes
of men. [Sidenote: Political history is the history of nation-making]

In the widest sense the subject of political history is the description
of the processes by which, under favourable circumstances, innumerable
such primitive tribes have become welded together into mighty nations,
with elevated standards of morals and manners, with wide and varied
experience, sustaining life and ministering to human happiness by
elaborate arts and sciences, and putting a curb upon warfare by limiting
its scope, diminishing its cruelty, and interrupting it by intervals of
peace. The story, as laid before us in the records of three thousand
years, is fascinating and absorbing in its human interest for those who
content themselves with the study of its countless personal incidents,
and neglect its profound philosophical lessons. But for those who study
it in the scientific spirit, the human interest of its details becomes
still more intensely fascinating and absorbing. Battles and coronations,
poems and inventions, migrations and martyrdoms, acquire new meanings
and awaken new emotions as we begin to discern their bearings upon the
solemn work of ages that is slowly winning for humanity a richer and
more perfect life. By such meditation upon men's thoughts and deeds is
the understanding purified, till we become better able to comprehend our
relations to the world and the duty that lies upon each of us to shape
his conduct rightly.

In the welding together of primitive shifting tribes into stable and
powerful nations, we can seem to discern three different methods that
have been followed at different times and places, with widely different
results. In all cases the fusion has been effected by war, but it has
gone on in three broadly contrasted ways. The first of these methods,
which has been followed from time immemorial in the Oriental world, may
be roughly described as _conquest without incorporation._ A tribe grows
to national dimensions by conquering and annexing its neighbours,
without admitting them to a share in its political life. Probably there
is always at first some incorporation, or even perhaps some crude germ
of federative alliance; but this goes very little way,--only far enough
to fuse together a few closely related tribes, agreeing in speech and
habits, into a single great tribe that can overwhelm its neighbours. In
early society this sort of incor