been world-wide in its adoption.

Wherever man desired to have a thing done, and was powerful enough to
insure the doing of it, there he attained his end by the simple
expedient of compelling others to do for him what he, unaided, could
not do for himself.

The individual, provided he did not conspire in sufficient numbers to
impede or defeat the end in view, counted only as a food-consuming
atom in the human mass which was set to work out the purpose of the
master mind and hand. His face value in the problem was that of a
living wage. If he sought to enhance his value by opposing the master
hand, the master hand seized him and wrung his withers.

So long as the compelling power confined the doing of the things it
desired done to works of construction, it met with little opposition
in its designs, experienced little difficulty in coercing the labour
necessary for piling its walls, excavating its tanks, raising its
pyramids and castles, or for levelling its roads and building its
ships and cities. These were the commonplace achievements of peace, at
which even the coerced might toil unafraid; for apart from the normal
incidence of death, such works entailed little danger to the lives of
the multitudes who wrought upon them. Men could in consequence be
procured for them by the exercise of the minimum of coercion--by, that
is to say, the mere threat of it.

When peace went to the wall and the pressed man was called upon to go
to battle, the case assumed another aspect, an acuter phase. Given a
state of war, the danger to life and limb, the incidence of death, at
once jumped enormously, and in proportion as these disquieting factors