d, and nature made man's friend and servant,
the human race increased and multiplied until the borders of communities
met and hostile relations arose between them. A fight for place began, a
struggle for dominion, a fierce and incessant contest for supremacy, and
for ages men locked arms in a terrible and merciless strife, in which
the weak and incompetent steadily went to the wall, the strong, daring,
and aggressive rose to power and control.

It was the final act in the great drama of "natural selection," which
had been played upon the stage of the earth since the first appearance
of living forms; the last and most ruthless of them all, for the
instigating cause was no longer merely the pressure for a share of the
food supply, but to this was added the lust for power and place, the
hunger for wealth and dominion, the insatiable appetite for autocratic
control. Millions upon millions of men were swept away by the sword,
and by its attendant demons, famine and pestilence; and still the
stronger and abler climbed to the top, the weaker and inferior
succumbed; and the intellectual evolution of man went on with enhanced
rapidity as the harvest of the sword was gathered in, and the merciless
reapers of men swept in successive columns over the earth, each a stage
higher in mental ability than the preceding.

This phase of human evolution is that of the era of human history.
Before its advent man had no history. It would be as useful to attempt
to give the history of the gorilla as of man in the early stages of his
progress. History is the record of individuality, and in primitive times
equality and communism prevailed, and the individual had not yet
separated himself from the mass. Man had settled into the dull inertness
of a stagnant pool, and the fierce winds of war were needed to break up
his mental slothfulness and stir thought into healthful activity. There
must be leaders before there can be history; the annals of mankind begin
in hero worship; the relations of superior and inferior need to be
established; and individual action and supremacy are the foundations
upon which all history is built. Only by stirring up the deep pool of
human life into seething turmoil and unrest could the tendency to
stagnation be overcome, the best and most aspiring rising to the top,
the dull and heavy sinking to the bottom, and the element of thought
permeating the whole with its vitalizing spirit.

When this phase of evolution is reach