Civilization and the Unemployed.

Where Civilization fails is in not providing men and women with sufficient work.  In the Stone Age man was, one imagines, kept busy.  When he was not looking for his dinner, or eating his dinner, or sleeping off the effects of his dinner, he was hard at work with a club, clearing the neighbourhood of what one doubts not he would have described as aliens.  The healthy Palæolithic man would have had a contempt for Cobden rivalling that of Mr. Chamberlain himself.  He did not take the incursion of the foreigner “lying down.”  One pictures him in the mind’s eye: unscientific, perhaps, but active to a degree difficult to conceive in these degenerate days.  Now up a tree hurling cocoa-nuts, the next moment on the ground flinging roots and rocks.  Both having tolerably hard heads, the argument would of necessity be long and heated.  Phrases that have since come to be meaningless had, in those days, a real significance.

When a Palæolithic politician claimed to have “crushed his critic,” he meant that he had succeeded in dropping a tree or a ton of earth upon him.  When it was said that one bright and intelligent member of that early sociology had “annihilated his opponent,” that opponent’s friends and relations took no further interest in him.  It meant that he was actually annihilated.  Bits of him might be found, but the most of him would be hopelessly scattered.  When the adherents of any particular Cave Dweller remarked that their man was wiping the floor with his rival, it did not mean that he was talking himself red in the face to a bored audience of sixteen friends and a reporter.  It meant that he was dragging that rival by the legs round the enclosure and making the place damp and untidy with him.