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By Root 552 0

newly perfected crafts now gave them. The attention of many of the more able or aggressive men was diverted from the cultivation of the fields and the manufacture of useful wares to other more amusing but less constructive pursuits. Their minds were filled with vain thoughts and they ran after glittering baubles. Their consuming ambition was to display wealth and power, to impress their peers with the magnificence of their attire, the grandeur of their palaces, the multitude of their dependents and concubines and slaves, the breadth of their conquests, and the number of their victims. Those who were more astute and grasping wrung from the sweating husbandmen and artisans the surplus of their labor, permitting them to keep the bare pittance necessary to sustain life and continue their toil. These toilers, ground into the dust, had neither leisure nor incentive to advance the admirable work so well begun by ancestors who still lived in small communities of free and essentially equal people, cultivating their fields together.

Moreover, the frequent wars and conquests instigated by the thirst for power and military glory greatly increased the number of slaves, upon whom, in the richer lands, fell an ever-increasing share of agricultural and industrial production. The opulent class who enjoyed the leisure to observe, to speculate, or to experiment with new processes had also the power to command others to work for them, hence they had little incentive to develop tools and methods that eased the burden of the oppressed laborer. Then, too, they evidently lacked that minute familiarity with the methods of production that is indispensable for their improvement. Even worse, since a great part of the community's manual labor was performed by slaves or freedmen, to work with one's hands became a mark of social inferiority, beneath the dignity of a well-born citizen. Things came to such a pass that Aristotle could write that it was impossible for an artisan or slave to cultivate virtueas he conceived it. The abundance of cheap or forced labor and disdain of manual operations perhaps explain why no ancient people, not even the Greeks with all their intellectual penetration and ingenuity, advanced far in the sciences that require experimentation and the construction

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of apparatus that is often elaborate, and why none invented much labor-saving machinery. It remained for a society that was outgrowing slavery and serfdom to progress notably in these fields.

It appears that the foundations of agriculture, and to a lesser extent of the crafts, were laid under the influence of deep vital urges impelling humanity toward ends it could not well foresee. Perhaps, if we could trace the origins of agriculture in detail, we would find that it began in much the same way as did the cultivation, by leaf-cutting Atta ants, of a special nutritious fungus on a carefully prepared medium; that it was essentially a biological development, owing much to mutation and selection, rather than a deliberate invention like the telephone or the airplane. One can readily understand why, in a later age, people in different lands attributed to gods or demigods the introduction of their cultivated plants, the domestication of fire, the arts of spinning and weaving, and other life-giving and life-preserving knowledge. But husbandry gave increased leisure to a privileged minority, whose still undisciplined minds spun all sorts of vain and mischievous notions. The deep, central impulses of humans as living beings were buried beneath superficial whims and fancies, which did not fail to be pernicious because they were shallow. Agriculture stagnated while empires expanded and cities grew more populous and corrupt.

The growth of civilization became a process wherein the two strata of society, the rulers and the toilers, mutually depraved each other. The laborers spoilt the rich by providing them with an excess of goods that permitted their indulgence in harmful luxuries and foolish ambitions. The rich ruined the poor by depriving them of the products