of desultory and unsettled action; the living spectacle of an
admitted unbelief destroys the binding authority of religious custom
and snaps the social cord.

Thus we see the use of a sort of 'preliminary' age in societies, when
trade is bad because it prevents the separation of nations, because it
infuses distracting ideas among occupied communities, because it
'brings alien minds to alien shores. And as the trade which we now
think of as an incalculable good, is in that age a formidable evil and
destructive calamity; so war and conquest, which we commonly and justly
see to be now evils, are in that age often singular benefits and great
advantages. It is only by the competition of customs that bad customs
can be eliminated and good customs multiplied. Conquest is the premium
given by nature to those national characters which their national
customs have made most fit to win in war, and in many most material
respects those winning characters are really the best characters. The
characters which do win in war are the characters which we should wish
to win in war.

Similarly, the best institutions have a natural military advantage over
bad institutions. The first great victory of civilisation was the
conquest of nations with ill-defined families having legal descent
through the mother only, by nations of definite families tracing
descent through the father as well as the mother, or through the father
only. Such compact families are a much better basis for military
discipline than the ill-bound families which indeed seem hardly to be
families at all, where 'paternity' is, for tribal purposes, an
unrecognised idea, and where only the physical fact of 'maternity' is
thought to be certain enough to be the foundation of law or custom. The
nations with a thoroughly compacted family system have 'possessed the
earth,' that is, they have taken all the finest districts in the most
competed-for parts; and the nations with loose systems have been merely
left to mountain ranges and lonely islands. The family system and that
in its highest form has been so exclusively the system of civilisation,
that literature hardly recognises any other, and that, if it were not
for the living testimony of a great multitude of scattered communities
which are 'fashioned after the structure of the elder world,' we should
hardly admit the possibility of something so contrary to all which we
have lived amongst, and which we have been used to think of. Af