The World's Great Classics
Format: Paperback
ISBN13: 9781458911230
Paperback|9781458911230
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III NATION-MAKING IN the last essay I endeavored 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 now-a-days 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): civilization may be thrown back by the conquest of many very rude men over a few less rude men. But the first elements of civilization are great military advantages, and, roughly, it is a rule of the first times that you can infer merit from conquest, and that pr...
| ISBN-13 | 9781458911230 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10 | 1458911233 |
| Weight | 0.37 Pounds |
| Dimensions | 9.00 x 6.00 x 0.25 In |
| List Price | $25.60 |
| Format | Paperback |
|---|---|
| Pages | 106 pages |
| Publisher | |
| Published On | 2009-08-01 |
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