Early instances of “Dumping.”

Maybe the Cave Dweller, finding nuts in his own neighbourhood growing scarce, would emigrate himself: for even in that age the politician was not always logical.  Thus rôles became reversed.  The defender of his country became the alien, dumping himself where he was not wanted.  The charm of those early political arguments lay in their simplicity.  A child could have followed every point.  There could never have been a moment’s doubt, even among his own followers, as to what a Palæolithic statesman really meant to convey.  At the close of the contest the party who considered it had won the moral victory would be cleared away, or buried neatly on the spot, according to taste: and the discussion, until the arrival of the next generation, was voted closed.

All this must have been harassing, but it did serve to pass away the time.  Civilization has brought into being a section of the community with little else to do but to amuse itself.  For youth to play is natural; the young barbarian plays, the kitten plays, the colt gambols, the lamb skips.  But man is the only animal that gambols and jumps and skips after it has reached maturity.  Were we to meet an elderly bearded goat, springing about in the air and behaving, generally speaking, like a kid, we should say it had gone mad.  Yet we throng in our thousands to watch elderly ladies and gentlemen jumping about after a ball, twisting themselves into strange shapes, rushing, racing, falling over one another; and present them with silver-backed hair-brushes and gold-handled umbrellas as a reward to them for doing so.

Imagine some scientific inhabitant of one of the larger fixed stars examining us through a magnifying-glass as we examine ants.  Our amusements would puzzle him.  The ball of all sorts and sizes, from the marble to the pushball, would lead to endless scientific argument.

“What is it?  Why are these men and women always knocking it about, seizing it wherever and whenever they find it and worrying it?”

The observer from that fixed star would argue that the Ball must be some malignant creature of fiendish power, the great enemy of the human race.  Watching our cricket-fields, our tennis-courts, our golf links, he would conclude that a certain section of mankind had been told off to do battle with the “Ball” on behalf of mankind in general.

“As a rule,” so he would report, “it is a superior class of insect to which this special duty has been assigned.  They are a friskier, gaudier species than their fellows.