chief. But it is evident that what mankind had caused to happen to the dog and the horse, the chief had accomplished in regard to the human beings who had come under his power. He had tamed them; they were no longer wild animals. They had rendered up individual liberty and self-reliant independence such as we see among many species of wild beasts. But instead, as the price of obedience to a will outside their own, they had received a thousand creature-comforts.

Only one more invention was needed to lift them to the highest and latest stage of barbarism. Some one now hit upon the art of smelting iron—the first invention that had not directly to do with the supplying of food. By leaps and bounds the art of smelting iron advanced man in the equipment of war, in the building of houses, roads, and vehicles of transportation. Now what magnificent returns individuals received for having surrendered their original liberty to do as they pleased! After all, what would independent initiative have been worth without fire or arrow or earthern kettle, or cow or horse or wheel, or sword and shield? Who would not have forfeited the bare birthright of empty (although healthy) independence for participation in the ever richer conquest over the physical resources of Nature?

XVII. CIVILIZATION PROPER

But now at last, only ten thousand years ago, the event occurred which put forever out of the question any possibility of prudence in any waywardness of individual whim, or any deviation from the rule dictated by the owner of things. This time the something that happened did not cause an increase of man's mastery over physical Nature. It was, instead, like that initial invention which turned apes into men. And again, like spoken language, it was a device to facilitate communication of mind with mind. In some one of the many groups of beings who had learned the use of fire, arrows, pots, sheep, and swords, some genius hit upon the idea of written signs as a medium of communication with those distant in space, and as a means of perpetuating a knowledge of the will of the dead among his survivors. But be it observed that only the master, never the man, only the owner of things, the controller of circumstances, was in a position to embody and preserve his judgment and desire in written signs. The new art of writing enhanced the power of rulers, of chiefs. The Pharaoh, not the fellah, dictated the inscription that was to be engraved. Thus all the rulers of the past were now able to perpetuate their power by adding their sanction to the word of the living chief, while no voice from the ranks of the governed would be allowed to immortalize itself in written speech. This is the reason that written language introduced civilization proper. There was no longer any chance for the wildness of the beast to crop out. Here began the empire of the dead over the living; but it was the empire of dead rulers over living slaves. The mastery over Nature and the monopoly of social power thereby became practically infinite. The tamers were now omnipotent in comparison with the tamed. It must be noticed that the process of transforming beasts into citizens was one to which only the tamed, but not the tamers, were subjected. The ruler stood outside of and above the rule he made. The law was for his subjects. This was the case with Henry VIII at the acme of civilization as it had been with the first of the Pharaohs.

Not only the blond beast of prey, but the swarthy also dictated an ethic for his subjects in order to keep himself in ascendancy. It was because Nietzsche admired all beasts of prey and felt contempt for their victims that he hated Jesus Christ and proudly assumed the title of Anti-Christ. For Christ had set up an ethic which encouraged the victims to protest and attempt to win back their primeval initiative, to take over the sovereignty which had been concentrated in the hands of the mighty and to diffuse it among the nobodies of the tribe. St. Luke goes so far as to assert that even before Jesus was born his Mother entertained levelling ideas. Into her lips he puts a song in which she magnifies the Lord because she believed her Son would bring down the mighty and exalt them of low degree. But alas! civilization went on for fifteen hundred years and succeeded in tying Christianity to the chariot-wheel of monopolized initiative.

XVIII. THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY AFTER CHRIST

Christianity had to wait for something to happen that would lend force to its Gospel. That something did not occur until the middle of the fifteenth century. Then, as I have already said without specifying what they were, a number of unforeseen events took place which opened the door to the divine bridegroom of humanity.

I have said that in the fifteenth century after Christ a new principle began to work in society; but I did not say that it was then for the first time promulgated. Civilization was the organization of man's mastery over Nature on a basis of self-interest; it was the giving only so much of wealth and power to the many as was compatible with the retention of one's own ascendancy. To be civilized, then, is evidently not to be Christian any more than it is to be Buddhistic or Judaic, socialistic or democratic. Everybody admits that one can be civilized and be none of these things: just as one may be "cultured" without being kind. In other words, it is consistent with being civilized to be highly selfish; one need only be rationalized in one's egoism. Indeed, civilization is the incarnation of self-interest. If self-interest, its basic principle, should give way to social interest; if the monopoly of social power should be broken and the power transferred to the general will of the community; if the community should relegate its administration to representatives, but should prevent these by some social device from ever usurping the power entrusted to them, then something new—something as different from civilization as the airship from the horse-cart—would have begun to establish itself. A new species of social order can be nothing other than an order whose basic principle is totally new; and what greater difference could exist in structuralizing tendencies than that between self-interest and the interest of the community? Whenever the latter gets the upper hand, it will be because Fate, the Cosmos, the Universe, the force within unconscious evolution, has caught up the song of the Magnificat. No such consummation of humanity has taken place, but it is undeniable that in the fifteenth century the Word entered like a seed into the soil of Fact. The Virgin's prophecy began to fulfil itself.

Familiar to everybody, and quickly to be specified, are the wonderful events which turned the vision into reality. One of these events was the invention of gunpowder; another was the mariner's compass; a third was the invention of paper; a fourth, the printing-press; a fifth was the discovery that the earth goes round the sun once a year, and whirls on its own axis once a day; a sixth was that indiscretion of Christopher Columbus, whereby instead of over-populated India he opened up a way to the vast and sparsely denizened Americas.

These events, each and severally and all together, produced in one particular the same sort of effect as the use of fire and of the bow and arrow, of pottery, the domestication of animals, and the smelting of iron: they enhanced incalculably the mastery of man over matter. But in the other particular characteristic of civilization they acted in the very opposite direction from all preceding inventions. Instead of entrenching the master in his monopoly of social power, instead of furthering the differentiation of society into master and man, they all played into the hands of the man. For the first time since the beginning of human evolution, inventions checked the monopolization of control over others. But the initiative that now flowed to the multitude of nobodies was not that puny freedom and narrow scope of self-realization which the talking ape had enjoyed. It was