and, were we to be reduced again suddenly to a state of nature, a company
of highly civilised men and women would at once, as we have before
remarked, find their social value completely inverted; landed on a desert
shore, unarmed and naked, to encounter wild beasts and savages, and to
combat nature for food, the primitive scale of human values would at once
reassert itself. It would not then be the mighty financier, the learned
judge, or great poet and scholar who would be sought after, but the
thickest-headed navvy who could throw a stone so exactly that he brought
down a bird, and who could in a day raise a wall which would shelter the
group; and the man so powerful that he could surely strike an enemy or wild
beast dead with his club, would at once be objects of social regard and
attain individual eminence, and perhaps dominance. It would not be the
skilled dancer, who in one night in a civilised state earns her hundreds,
nor yet the fragile clinging beauty, but the girl of the broad back and the
strong limb, who could collect wood and carry water, who would be the much
considered and much sought after female in such a community. Even in the
animal world, there is the same inversion in values, according as the
external conditions vary. The lion, while ruling over every other creature
in his primitive wilds, by right of his untamable ferocity, size, and
rapacity, is yet bound to become a prey to destruction and extermination
when he comes into contact with the new condition brought by man; while the
wild dog, so immeasurably his inferior in size and ferocity, is tamed,
survives and multiplies, exactly because he has been driven by his smaller
structure and lesser physical force to develop those social instincts and
those forms of intelligence which make him amenable to the new condition of
life and valuable in them. The same inversion in the value of qualities
may be traced in the history of human species. The Jews, whose history has
been one long story of oppression at the hands of more muscular, physically
powerful and pugilistic peoples; whom we find first making bricks under the
lash of the Egyptian, and later hanging his harp as an exile among the