able to live in peace with each other, that the greater morality of
animals is due. Yet, we have to recognise, this mischievous tendency to
warfare, so often (though by no means always, and in the earliest stages
probably never) found in primitive man, was bound up with his superior
and progressive qualities. His intelligence, his quickness of sense, his
muscular skill, his courage and endurance, his aptitude for discipline
and for organisation--all of them qualities on which civilisation is
based--were fostered by warfare. With warfare in primitive life was
closely associated the still more fundamental art, older than humanity,
of dancing. The dance was the training school for all the activities
which man developed in a supreme degree--for love, for religion, for
art, for organised labour--and in primitive days dancing was the chief
military school, a perpetual exercise in mimic warfare during times of
peace, and in times of war the most powerful stimulus to military
prowess by the excitement it aroused. Not only was war a formative and
developmental social force of the first importance among early men, but
it was comparatively free from the disadvantages which warfare later on
developed; the hardness of their life and the obtuseness of their
sensibility reduced to a minimum the bad results of wounds and shocks,
while their warfare, being free from the awful devices due to the
devilry of modern man, was comparatively innocuous; even if very
destructive, its destruction was necessarily limited by the fact that
those accumulated treasures of the past which largely make civilisation
had not come into existence. We may admire the beautiful humanity, the
finely developed social organisation, and the skill in the arts attained
by such people as the Eskimo tribes, which know nothing of war, but we
must also recognise that warfare among primitive peoples has often been
a progressive and developmental force of the first importance, creating
virtues apt for use in quite other than military spheres.[2]