inter-group strifes which, among peoples of an unsettled discipline, are always crossing the development of the organization of men against nature. The Romans were remarkably tolerant of their subjects' customs and beliefs in so far as the latter did not interfere with the progress and solidification of Roman rule. This was one of the great reasons for their successes, not only in holding the empire together, but in advancing the fortunes of subject peoples. The latter adopted Roman ideas and customs because they saw the use of them under the more settled and industrial conditions now possible. The Roman language gave them more ease in speaking of the new relations, for it included names for new things just coming into their purview with the advancement of their material civilization and the elevation of their standard of living; the Roman law corresponded to the needs of new relations in all walks of a more ordered life; and so on. Hence the coercive measures of the Romans were of a civilizing nature, as those of later conquerors have seldom been. They were constructive and disciplinary. What the Romans did was to apply their practical minds and executive ability to the task of organizing the civilization of their time; thereafter it advanced with greater smoothness and coördination. And, after all, the Roman influence toward the elevation of civilization was exercised, to all intents and purposes, unconsciously, or at any rate the driving force was selfinterest. In this respect it coincides with the activity of the early Mediterranean trading nations.

In later times the conscious motive or mission of uplifting other peoples has played a part practically unknown to the ancient and mediæval times. It means, of course, that these lower peoples shall be made "as we are." But those who attempted such transformation had their eye not upon the fundamentals, as we have seen them, but upon the more obvious customs, habitudes, institutions, and beliefs upon which a group rests its individuality and superiority. But these things we have come to view as, one might say, secondary social forms resting upon the primary, and normally modifiable only through antecedent modification of these latter. A purely hunting tribe cannot understand a system of private property in land; the fundamental and maintaining activity of the group demands that every one shall have the usufruct of the whole hunting ground. There is no object in dividing it up. Now, any people is sensitive with regard to these secondary matters, - family and property relations, religion, and so on, and there is no much surer way of alienating either individual or group than by a direct and contemptuous attack upon long-settled

habitudes of life, than which no others are known or respected. Moreover, if by force these secondary matters are suppressed or modified, without a corresponding change in the basis upon which they rest, there can be no longer any harmony between the group's life conditions and its manner of living; and this means bewilderment and demoralization. If this is true, the great superiority, at least in earlier times, of the agency which rouses no antagonism, but yet strikes deep at the economic root of a society's life, becomes the more clearly apparent.

203. Adaptability and efficacy of trade. The trader's business, in all ages, is to placate his customers, for only thus do profits accrue. Hence by a very instinct he lets the private individual or group interests of his clients alone, and tries to tempt them with what they want or can easily be made to want. But what they want, since every group is well satisfied with its own way of living, and convinced that its customs are best, are mainly material things. An American Indian may not care for a copy of Shakespeare's plays, but he does immediately sense the superiorities of the steel ax over the flint one, and of the gun over the bow and arrow. His family and social system, his religion, are not open to discussion, for they are in the body of a life policy bequeathed to him by the apotheosized dead. But variations in the material outfit of life can be concretely tested and selected when tactfully presented. If, now, we turn back to the early Mediterranean traders, we find them in full possession of such insight into the barbaric mind. To demonstrate this fact it is only necessary to catalogue the articles of the Phoenician west-bound traffic: metallic products, fabrics (especially linen), wine, oil, prepared spices, incense, perfumes, dyes, drugs, embalming mixtures, domesticated animals and plants (grains, trees, etc.). Plainly all these could come under two categories: products of another zone, and products of a higher culture. The latter exercised a livelier incitement to progress, the more so as they could be duplicated nearly anywhere, provided the knowledge of the processes could be obtained. But it would be a dull tribe indeed- -and the peoples about the Mediterranean were not dull-that could not pick up something of the processes from observation of the products, and besides, the slave trade furnished teachers in the person of kidnapped members of more civilized communities. Thus, beginning with the easily stimulated desire for a bronze ax, or a better plant or animal, the influence of a higher culture could come to be pervasive of all the groups with which it entered into contact. For after the less developed societies had been provided with the most obvious advantages of a

higher material civilization, they were ready to reach out after the more complex and refined; they would want better and more uniform. weights and measures, less primitive methods in trade, better shipping and knowledge of navigation, a more developed conception of mine and thine, more intelligent theories of life in general in short, a better equipment, both material and intellectual, for the struggle for existence. All these things might come as the direct results of trade with thoroughly self-seeking traders, as those of antiquity were; and they did come, first to the Mediterranean peoples and then to those farther to the north and west. Whatever view is taken of the causes of this extension of culture must include a large recognition of the factor of commerce. One might go further and cite the disintegrating effect of trade upon the feudal system, and show how it was the activity of the Venetians and Genoese that ushered in the modern era, with its initial feats of the Discoveries, all the most important of which were motived to a predominant degree, directly or indirectly, by trade interests or prospects.

We have seen in preceding pages (§§ 166, 173) that civilization is a product not only of numbers but of the contact of numbers. It was trade which, above all, secured such contact in the earlier periods; and it was because this trade operated as a factor in harmony with the predisposition of its age that it managed to exert, unwittingly and without premeditation, such a strong civilizing influence.

204. Trade's civilizing function in different periods. Such influence has not been confined to ancient times. Trade is still the great educative factor as between peoples of diverse degrees of culture, if not as between those of approximately equal attainments. For several reasons, however, it has not met in later times with the striking degree of success which was reached when the western world was younger. First of all, modern trade has not had the same ground to work upon, for the commerce of the pre-Discovery Period had succeeded in effect in bringing together all the European nations into a common market, that is, in exhausting the frontier trade in so far as it applied to peoples fitted by environment and race character to rise speedily to a high civilization (§§ 148, 174, 193). No such results in the spread of culture could be hoped for from contact with American Indians and South Africans as were attained through the purveying of products to European stocks, to so-called "active races," like the Greeks. Later civilizing agencies have had to do either with the backward races of the temperate zones (Americans, Australians, Hottentots) or with those many tropical peoples whose environment has not

conduced to their advance in civilization or receptivity for ideas of culture. There has been developed through the ages, as between the more and the less developed races, a great chasm, as it were, and a contrast of superior and inferior (§§ 147-148, 174 ff.). The bridging of this gulf is a matter of long time and arduous effort, if, indeed, it is possible. Hence no means whatsoever have availed to raise the less developed races to take their place on a par with their educators, as the less developed peoples of Europe with comparative rapidity came to do. This is the great and crucial consideration; but there are others that may be named more perfunctorily. In later times the movement of civilized races into the habitat of savage races of the temperate zone has been so massive and overwhelming that it has swept the natives from the field before they had a chance to become civilized; nothing such took place in the pre-Discovery Period. Again, in later times, the element of overreaching and dishonesty in trade, together with the tendency to purvey hurtful commodities, has become so highly developed, in dealing with unsophisticated peoples, that it is often said that trade actually opposes civilization. Also, while traders in early times used violence if they could, they have been able in more modern times to control such superiority of force (firearms, etc.) that their will has been too often imposed upon a people entirely against its desire and apart from any choice or demand upon its part for products offered. Instead of trading, the nations of a higher civilization have exploited, especially when they were opening up a tropical region where they could not themselves sojourn for any considerable time (§§ 144-145). Besides all this, a multitude of other factors have, in later times, combined with that of trade; and the result is that the separate action of any single one of these, including trade, can scarcely be estimated. Political subjugation and government, missionary activity, educative systems, and the rest, all enter now as factors, each hailed by its partisans as supremely beneficial for the uplifting of the benighted.

The earlier civilizers had it more simply: they came into contact with groups of their own race, in their own climatic habitat. These groups were characterized by no obvious differences, and the stages of culture were separated by no impassable chasm. There was no "native-labor question." Apart from Rome, whose influence has been characterized, the metropolises (being cities or small countries) did not possess the power to subjugate utterly, but had perforce to exhibit tolerance and to do their teaching by example and suggestion rather than with the aid of the rod. And, above all, this their influence was exercised unconsciously, and its results are thus referable to

the interplay of natural forces rather than to the will of man. How far superior and how much more unerring in securing results these elemental forces are has already been explained (§ 141).

But it is the firm belief of many that trade is still, with all its modern drawbacks, the prime agency in the spread of culture; that if anything could, or can, uplift the lower races to a place where they can compete for and hold a position in the new world order, it is trade. In any case, the opinion is gaining ground that to effect any such elevation of the backward races the point of attack is that old one of trade at the bottom. Medical and industrial missions, by their superiority over more purely religious ones, bear witness of this truth; it is seen that the first education a savage needs is that which issues in bodily well-being and in production. But production, in any but a minimal degree, itself means trade. It is safe to say that exchange has been the greatest and will always remain a superlatively important agency for the elevation of the race. The more developed races are constantly uplifting themselves by the advancement of mutual trade relations. The development of such relations means the growth of understanding, tolerance, and sympathy, and the gradual dissemination of what each has among all; it leads, through international specialization and division of labor, to world coöperation in the struggle for existence and for a higher standard of living on the part of all civilized humanity. The trade in things means presently the exchange of ideas, not only those of a practical bearing, but also those which deal with art, music, and all the other higher forms of culture. So that, giving trade its due, and no more, it is certainly fair to call it the "handmaid of civilization."