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
nowadays 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): civilisation
may be thrown back by the conquest of many very rude men over a few
less rude men. But the first elements of civilisation are great
military advantages, and, roughly, it is a rule of the first times
that you can infer merit from conquest, and that progress is
promoted by the competitive examination of constant war.
This principle explains at once why the 'protected' regions of the
world--the interior of continents like Africa, outlying islands like
Australia or New Zealand--are of necessity backward.
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