Human history, in this sphere, is the story of man making himself at home in the world. When human history begins we find men helpless, superstitious, ignorant, the plaything of blind powers in the natural and animal world. Superstitious because he was helpless, helpless because he was ignorant, he eked out a bare existence rather by avoiding than controlling the forces in the little world by which he found himself surrounded. Human life in its earliest stages is, as Hobbes described it, nasty, brutish, and short. Man was the slave of his environment. He has risen to become its master. The world, as the prophetic eye of Francis Bacon foretold, has become 'The Kingdom of Man'.
How complete this conquest is, can best be realized perhaps by considering man's relation to the lower animals. When history opens, the animals are in their element; it is man who is the interloper. Two thousand years ago it was not the Society of Friends but wolves and wild boars who felt themselves at home on the site of Bournville Garden Village. To-day we are surprised when we read that in remote East Africa lions and giraffes venture occasionally to interfere in the murderous warfare between man and man. Man has imposed himself on the animals, by dint of his gradual accumulation of knowledge and his consequent power of organization and government. He has destroyed the conditions under which the animals prospered. He has, as we might say, destroyed their home life, exposing them to dangers of his own making against which they are now as powerless as he was once against them. 'It is a remarkable thing,' writes Sir E. Ray Lankester,
which possibly may be less generally true than our present knowledge seems to suggest—that the adjustment of organisms to their surroundings is so severely complete in Nature apart from Man, that diseases are unknown as constant and normal phenomena under those conditions. It is no doubt difficult to investigate this matter, since the presence of Man as an observer itself implies human intervention. But it seems to be a legitimate view that every disease to which animals (and probably plants also) are liable, excepting as a transient and very exceptional occurrence, is due to Man's interference. The diseases of cattle, sheep, pigs, and horses are not known except in domesticated herds and those wild creatures to which Man's domesticated productions have communicated them. The trypanosome lives in the blood of wild game and of rats without producing mischief. The hosts have become tolerant of the parasite. It is only when man brings his unselected, humanly-nurtured races of cattle and horses into contact with the parasite, that it is found to have deadly properties. The various cattle-diseases which in Africa have done so much harm to native cattle, and have in some regions exterminated big game, have per contra been introduced by man through his importation of diseased animals of his own breeding from Europe. Most, if not all, animals in extra-human conditions, including the minuter things such as insects, shellfish, and invisible aquatic organisms, have been brought into a condition of 'adjustment' to their parasites as well as to the other conditions in which they live: it is this most difficult and efficient balance of Nature which Man everywhere upsets.[54]
And Sir E. Ray Lankester goes on to point out the moral to be drawn from this development. He points out that
civilized man has proceeded so far in his interference with extra-human nature, has produced for himself and the living organisms associated with him such a special state of things by his rebellion against natural selection and his defiance of Nature's pre-human dispositions, that he must either go on and acquire firmer control of the conditions, or perish miserably by the vengeance certain to fall on the half-hearted meddler in great affairs. We may indeed compare civilized man to a successful rebel against Nature, who, by every step forward, renders himself liable to greater and greater penalties, and so cannot afford to pause or fail in one single step. Or again we may think of him as the heir to a vast and magnificent kingdom, who has been finally educated so as to take possession of his property, and is at length left alone to do his best; he has wilfully abrogated, in many important respects, the laws of his mother Nature by which the kingdom was hitherto governed; he has gained some power and advantage by so doing, but is threatened on every hand by dangers and disasters hitherto restrained: no retreat is possible—his only hope is to control, as he knows that he can, the sources of these dangers and disasters.
The time will come, not too long hence, as I believe, when men have realized, with the scientists, that the world is one kingdom not many, and these problems of man's relation to his non-human environment will be the first concern of statesmen and governors. In some of our tropical colonies they have, perforce, become so already. If you live on the Gold Coast, the war against malaria cannot help seeming more important to you than the war against German trade: and in parts of Central Africa the whole possibility of continued existence centres round the presence or absence of the tsetse fly which is the carrier of sleeping sickness. Some day, when means have been adopted for abating our fiercer international controversies, we shall discover that in these and kindred matters lies the real province of world-politics. When that day comes the chosen representatives of the human race will see their constituents, as only philosophers see them now, as the inheritors of a great tradition of service and achievement, and as trustees for their successors of the manifold sources of human happiness which the advance of knowledge has laid open to us.
If the first and most important of these sources is the discovery of the conditions of physical well-being, the second is the discovery of means of communication between the widely separate portions of man's kingdom. The record of the process of bringing the world under the control of the organized government of man is largely the record of the improvement of communications. Side by side with the unending struggle of human reason against cold and hunger and disease we can watch the contest against distance, against ocean and mountain and desert, against storms and seasons. There can be few subjects more fascinating for a historian to study than the record of the migrations of the tribes of men. He might begin, if he wished, with the migrations of animals and describe the westward progress of the many species whose course can be traced by experts along the natural highways of Western Europe. Some of them, so the books tell us, reached the end of their journey while Britain was still joined to the continent. Others arrived too late and were cut off by the straits of Dover. I like to form an imaginary picture, which the austerity of the scientific conscience will, I know, repudiate with horror, of the unhappy congregation, mournfully assembled bag and baggage on the edge of the straits and gazing wistfully across at the white cliffs of England, which they were not privileged to reach—tendentesque manus ripae ulterioris amore, 'stretching out their paws in longing for the further bank.'
Our historian would then go on to describe the early 'wanderings of peoples' (Völkerwanderungen) how whole tribes would move off in the spring-time in the search for fresh hunting-grounds or pasture. He would trace the course of that westward push which, starting from somewhere in Asia, brought its impact to bear on the northern provinces of the Roman Empire and eventually loosened its whole fabric. He would show how Europe, as we know it, was welded into unity by the attacks of migratory warriors on three flanks—the Huns and the Tartars, a host of horsemen riding light over the steppes of Russia and Hungary: the Arabs, bearing Islam with them on their camels as they moved westward along North Africa and then pushing across into Spain: and the Northmen of Scandinavia, those carvers of kingdoms and earliest conquerors of the open sea, who left their mark on England and northern France, on Sicily and southern Italy, on the Balkan Peninsula, on Russia, on Greenland, and as far as North America. Then, passing to Africa and Asia, he would describe the life of the pack-saddle and the caravan, the long and mysterious inland routes from the Mediterranean to Nubia and Nigeria, or from Damascus with the pilgrims to Medina, and the still longer and more mysterious passage through the ancient oases of Turkestan, now buried in sand, along which, as recent discoveries have shown us, Greece and China, Christianity and Buddhism, exchanged their arts and ideas and products. Then he would tell of the great age of maritime discovery, of the merchant-adventurers and buccaneers, of their gradual transformation into trading companies, in the East and in the West, from companies to settlements, from settlements to colonies. Then perhaps he would close by casting a glimpse at the latest human migration of all, that which takes place or took place up to 1914, at the rate of a million a year from the Old World into the United States. He would take the reader to Ellis Island in New York harbour, where the immigrants emerge from the steerage to face the ordeal of the Immigration Officer. He would show how the same causes, hunger, fear, persecution, restlessness, ambition, love of liberty, which set the great westward procession in motion in the early days of tribal migration, are still alive and at work to-day among the populations of Eastern Europe. He would look into their minds and read the story of the generations of their nameless fore-runners; and he would ask himself whether rulers and statesmen have done all that they might to make the world a home for all its children, for the poor as for the rich, for the Jew as for the Gentile, for the yellow and dark-skinned as for the white.
Let us dwell for a moment more closely on one phase of this record of the conquest of distance. The crucial feature in that struggle was the conquest of the sea. The sea-surface of the world is far greater than its land-surface, and the sea, once subdued, is a far easier and more natural means of transport and communication. For the sea, the uncultivable sea, as Homer calls it, is itself a road, whereas on earth, whether it be mountain or desert or field, roads have first painfully to be made. Man's definitive conquest of the sea dates from the middle of the fifteenth century when, by improvements in the art of sailing and by the extended use of the mariner's compass, it first became possible to undertake long voyages with assurance. These discoveries are associated with the name of Prince Henry of Portugal, whose life-long ambition it was, to quote the words engraved on his monument at the southern extremity of Portugal, 'to lay open the regions of West Africa across the sea, hitherto not traversed by man, that thence a passage might be made round Africa to the most distant parts of the East.'
The opening of the high seas which resulted from Prince Henry's activities is one of the most momentous events in human history. Its effect was, sooner or later, to unite the scattered families of mankind, to make the problems of all the concern of all: to make the world one place. Prince Henry and his sailors were, in fact, the pioneers of internationalism, with all the many and varied problems that internationalism brings with it. 'In 1486,' says the most recent history of this development,