competitors is the particular mode by which the best qualities
wanted in elementary civilisation are propagated and preserved.

No. III

NATION-MAKING.

In the last essay I endeavoured to show that in the early age of
man--the 'fighting age' I called it--there was a considerable,
though not certain, tendency towards progress. The best nations
conquered the worst; by the possession of one advantage or another
the best competitor overcame the inferior competitor. So long as
there was continual fighting there was a likelihood of improvement
in martial virtues, and in early times many virtues are really
'martial'--that is, tend to success in war--which in later times we
do not think of so calling, because the original usefulness is hid
by their later usefulness. We judge of them by the present effects,
not by their first. The love of law, for example, is a virtue which
no one now would call martial, yet in early times it disciplined
nations, and the disciplined nations won. The gift of 'conservative
innovation'--the gift of MATCHING new institutions to old--is not
nowadays a warlike virtue, yet the Romans owed much of their success
to it. Alone among ancient nations they had the deference to usage
which, combines nations, and the partial permission of selected
change which improves nations; and therefore they succeeded. Just so
in most cases, all through the earliest times, martial merit is a
token of real merit: the nation that wins is the nation that ought
to win. The simple virtues of such ages mostly make a man a soldier
if they make him anything. No doubt the brute force of number may be
too potent even then (as so often it is afterwards): civilisation