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362 The Ideal of Human UnityRome; but the slave was soon replaced by the proletariate, calledin India the Shudra, and the increasing tendency to deny thehighest benefits of the common life and culture to the Shudraand the woman brought down Indian society to the level of itsWestern congeners. It is possible that these two great problemsof economic serfdom and the subjection of woman might havebeen attacked and solved in the early community if it had livedlonger, as it has now been attacked and is in process of solutionin the modern State. But it is doubtful; only in Rome do weglimpse certain initial tendencies which might have turned inthat direction and they never went farther than faint hints of afuture possibility.More vital was the entire failure of this early form of humansociety to solve the question of the interrelations between communityand community. War remained their normal relation.All attempts at free federation failed, and military conquestwas left as the sole means of unification. The attachment tothe small aggregate in which each man felt himself to be mostalive had generated a sort of mental and vital insularity whichcould not accommodate itself to the new and wider ideas whichphilosophy and political thought, moved by the urge of largerneeds and tendencies, brought into the field of life. Therefore theold States had to dissolve and disappear, in India into the hugebureaucratic empires of the Gupta and the Maurya to whichthe Pathan, the Moghul and the Englishman succeeded, in theWest into the vast military and commercial expansions achievedby Alexander, by the Carthaginian oligarchy and by the Romanrepublic and empire. The latter were not national but supranationalunities, premature attempts at too large unifications ofmankind that could not really be accomplished with any finalityuntil the intermediate nation-unit had been fully and healthilydeveloped.The creation of the national aggregate was therefore reservedfor the millennium that followed the collapse of theRoman Empire; and in order to solve this problem left to it, theworld during that period had to recoil from many and indeedmost of the gains which had been achieved for mankind by the