Such seems to have been the final outcome of the contest with nature, where permitted to develop in its natural and unobstructed way. A series of empires of a simple type of organization arose, their rulers uniting temporal and spiritual power, and becoming autocrats in a double sense, supreme lords of body and soul. It was in its nature a persistent type. Once reached, it tended to continue indefinitely, stagnation following the era of growth. But war and invasion have broken it up everywhere except in China, a country largely defended by nature against invasion and inhabited by an innately peaceful people. As the forest Pygmy group represents to-day the completion of the first stage of human evolution, so the patriarchal empire of China represents that of the second. Stagnation there long since succeeded development. For several thousand years China has almost stood still. It comes down to us as the fossilized representative of an antique system, physically active but mentally inert, its organization rigidly fixed, and not to be disturbed unless the empire itself is rent to pieces.
Long before the second phase of the evolution of man had been completed the third phase had begun, that of the conflict of man with man. The animal kingdom once subdued, and nature made man's friend and servant, the human race increased and multiplied until the borders of communities met and hostile relations arose between them. A fight for place began, a struggle for dominion, a fierce and incessant contest for supremacy, and for ages men locked arms in a terrible and merciless strife, in which the weak and incompetent steadily went to the wall, the strong, daring, and aggressive rose to power and control.
It was the final act in the great drama of "natural selection," which had been played upon the stage of the earth since the first appearance of living forms; the last and most ruthless of them all, for the instigating cause was no longer merely the pressure for a share of the food supply, but to this was added the lust for power and place, the hunger for wealth and dominion, the insatiable appetite for autocratic control. Millions upon millions of men were swept away by the sword, and by its attendant demons, famine and pestilence; and still the stronger and abler climbed to the top, the weaker and inferior succumbed; and the intellectual evolution of man went on with enhanced rapidity as the harvest of the sword was gathered in, and the merciless reapers of men swept in successive columns over the earth, each a stage higher in mental ability than the preceding.