past. We cannot understand one epoch without reference to its
predecessors; we cannot understand the history of the United States
unless we seek the key in the history of Europe--of England and France
in particular. At the very threshold, in order to understand how the
heroic navigator came to discover the vast continent of which the United
States is part, we must pause to study the economic conditions of Europe
which impelled the adventurous voyage, and led to the discovery of a
great continent stretching across the ocean path. Such a view of history
does not rob it of its romance, but rather adds to it. Surely, the
wonderful linking of circumstances--the demand for spices and silks to
minister to the fine tastes of aristocratic Europe, the growth of the
trade with the East Indies, the grasping greed of Moor and Turk--all
playing a role in the great drama of which the discovery of America is
but a scene, is infinitely more fascinating than the latter event
detached from its historical setting!

It is not easy to give in the compass of a few pages an intelligent view
of the main currents of history. The sketch here introduced--not without
hesitation--is an endeavor to state the Socialist concept of the course
of social evolution in a brief outline and to indicate the principal
economic causes which have operated to determine that course.

It is now generally admitted that primitive man lived under Communism.
Lewis H. Morgan[88] has calculated that if the life of the human race be
assumed to have covered one hundred thousand years, at least ninety-five
thousand years were spent in a crude, tribal Communism, in which private
property was practically unknown, and in which the only ethic was
devotion to tribal interests, and the only crime antagonism to tribal
interests. Under this social system the means of making wealth were in
the hands of the tribes, or _gens_, and distribution was likewise
socially arranged. Between the different tribes warfare was constant,
but in the tribe itself there was cooeperation and not struggle. This
fact is of tremendous importance in view of the criticisms which have
been directed against the Socialist philosophy from the so-called
Darwinian point of view, according to which competition and struggle is
the law of life; that what Professor Huxley calls "the Hobbesial war of
each against all" is the normal state of existence.

This is described as "the so-called Darwinian" theory advisedly,