occupation. The supply of food was no longer strictly limited, for it
could be indefinitely increased by peaceful industry; and moreover, in
the free exchange of the products of labour, it ceased to be true that
one man's interest was opposed to another's. Men did not at once
recognize this fact, and indeed it has not yet become universally
recognized, so long have men persisted in interpreting the conditions of
industrial life in accordance with the immemorial traditions of the time
when the means of subsistence were strictly limited, so that one man's
success meant another's starvation. Our robber tariffs--miscalled
"protective"--are survivals of the barbarous mode of thinking which
fitted the ages before industrial civilization began. But although the
pacific implications of free exchange were very slowly recognized, it is
not the less true that the beginnings of agriculture and commerce marked
the beginnings of the greatest social revolution in the whole career of
mankind. Henceforth the conditions for the maintenance of physical life
became different from what they had been throughout the past history of
the animal world. It was no longer necessary for men to quarrel for
their food like dogs over a bone; for they could now obtain it far more
effectively by applying their intelligence to the task of utilizing the
forces of inanimate nature; and the due execution of such a task was in
no wise assisted by wrath and contention, but from the outset was rather
hindered by such things.

Such were the beginnings of industrial civilization. Out of its
exigencies, continually increasing in complexity, have proceeded,
directly or indirectly, the arts and sciences which have given to modern
life so much of its interest and value. But more important still has been
the work of industrial civilization in the ethical field. By furnishing
a wider basis for political union than mere blood-relationship, it
greatly extended the area within which moral obligations were recognized