all, may be an essential and beneficial element in human affairs,
destined to endure to the end, just as it has been present from the
beginning. But has it been present from the beginning? Even though war
may have flourished for many thousands of years--and it was certainly
flourishing at the dawn of history--we are still very far indeed from
the dawn of human life or even of human civilisation, for the more our
knowledge of the past grows the more remote that dawn is seen to be. It
is not only seen to be very remote, it is seen to be very important.
Darwin said that it was during the first three years of life that a man
learnt most. That saying is equally true of humanity as a whole, though
here one must translate years into hundreds of thousands of years. But
neither infant man nor infant mankind could establish themselves firmly
on the path that leads so far if they had at the very outset, in
accordance with Dr. Woods' formula for more recent ages, "fought about
half the time." An activity of this kind which may be harmless, or even
in some degree beneficial at a later stage, would be fatally disastrous
at an early stage. War, as Mankind understands war, seems to have no
place among animals living in Nature. It seems equally to have had no
place, so far as investigation has yet been able to reveal, in the life
of early man. Men were far too busy in the great fight against Nature
to fight against each other, far too absorbed in the task of inventing
methods of self-preservation to have much energy left for inventing
methods of self-destruction. It was once supposed that the Homeric
stories of war presented a picture of life near the beginning of the
world. The Homeric picture in fact corresponds to a stage in human
barbarism, certainly in its European manifestation, a stage also passed
through in Northern Europe, where, nearly fifteen hundred years ago,
the Greek traveller, Posidonius, found the Celtic chieftains in Britain
living much like the people in Homer. But we now know that Homer, so
far from bringing before us a primitive age, really represents the end