fter life to a military discipline, a military drill, and a military
despotism. They were ready to obey their generals because they were
compelled to obey their fathers; they centered the world in manhood
because as children they were bred in homes where the tradition of
passionate valour was steadied by the habit of implacable order. And
nothing of this is possible in loosely-bound family groups (if they can
be called families at all) where the father is more or less uncertain,
where descent is not traced through him, where, that is, property does
not come from him, where such property as he has passes to his SURE
relations--to his sister's children. An ill-knit nation which does not
recognise paternity as a legal relation, would be conquered like a mob
by any other nation which had a vestige or a beginning of the patria
potestas. If, therefore, all the first men had the strict morality of
families, they would no more have permitted the rise of SEMI-moral
nations anywhere in the world than the Romans would have permitted them
to arise in Italy. They would have conquered, killed, and plundered
them before they became nations; and yet semi-moral nations exist all
over the world.

It will be said that this argument proves too much. For it proves that
not only the somewhat-before-history men, but the absolutely first men,
could not have had close family instincts, and yet if they were like
most though not all of the animals nearest to man they had such
instincts. There is a great story of some African chief who expressed
his disgust at adhering to one wife, by saying it was 'like the
monkeys.' The semi-brutal ancestors of man, if they existed, had very
likely an instinct of constancy which the African chief, and others
like him, had lost. How, then, if it was so beneficial, could they ever
lose it? The answer is plain: they could lose it if they had it as an
irrational propensity and habit, and not as a moral and rational
feeling. When reason came, it would weaken that habit like all other
irrational habits. And reason is a force of such infinite vigour--a
victory-making agent of such incomparable efficiency--that its
continually diminishing valuable instincts will not matter if it grows
itself steadily all the while. The strongest competitor wins in both
the cases we are imagining; in the first, a race with intelligent
reason, but without blind instinct, beats a race with that instinct but
without that reason; in the seco