carried with them. We may use, perhaps, the unvarying savage as a
metre to gauge the vigour of the constitutions to whose contact he
is exposed.

Particular consequences may be dubious, but as to the main fact
there is no doubt: the military strength of man has been growing
from the earliest time known to our history, straight on till now.
And we must not look at times known by written records only; we must
travel back to older ages, known to us only by what lawyers call
REAL evidence--the evidence of things. Before history began, there
was at least as much progress in the military art as there has been
since. The Roman legionaries or Homeric Greeks were about as
superior to the men of the shell mounds and the flint implements as
we are superior to them. There has been a constant acquisition of
military strength by man since we know anything of him, either by
the documents he has composed or the indications he has left.

The cause of this military growth is very plain. The strongest
nation has always been conquering the weaker; sometimes even
subduing it, but always prevailing over it. Every intellectual gain,
so to speak, that a nation possessed was in the earliest times made
use of--was INVESTED and taken out--in war; all else perished. Each
nation tried constantly to be the stronger, and so made or copied
the best weapons; by conscious and unconscious imitation each nation
formed a type of character suitable to war and conquest. Conquest
improved mankind by the intermixture of strengths; the armed truce,
which was then called peace, improved them by the competition of
training and the consequent creation of new power. Since the long-
headed men first drove the short-headed men out of the best land in
Europe, all European history has been the history of the