from the presence of this type of men, who hold this principle of
life.

If, therefore, after a fair degree of national unity has been
attained, the higher stages of national evolution depend on the higher
development of individualism, and if the only kind of individualism of
which men can conceive is the egoistic, it becomes evident that
further progress must cease. Stagnation, or degeneration, must follow.
This is what has happened to nearly all the great nations and races of
the world. They progressed well up to a certain point. Then they
halted or fell back. The only possible condition under which a new
lease of progressive life could be secured by them was a new variety
of individualism, which would unite the opposite and apparently
contradictory poles of communalism and egoism, namely,
communo-individualism. Inconceivable though it be to those men and
nations who have not experienced this type of life, it is nevertheless
a fact, and a mighty factor in human and in national evolution. In its
light we are able to see that the communal life itself has not reached
its fullest development until the individualistic principle has been
not only recognized in thought, but exalted, both in theory and in
fact, to its true and coordinate position beside the communal
principle. Only then does the nation become fully and completely
organized. Only then does the national organism contain within itself
the means for an endless, because a self-sustained, life.

It is important to guard against a misunderstanding of the principles
just enunciated which may easily arise. In saying that the
development of the individual has proceeded pari passu with that of
the community, that every gain by the community has contributed
directly to the development of the individual, I do not say that the
communal profits are at once distributed among all the members of the
group, or that the distribution is at all equal. Indeed, such is far
from the case. Some few individuals seem to appropriate a large and
unfair proportion of the communal bank account. So far as a people
live a simple and relatively undifferentiated life, all sharing in
much the same kind of pursuits, and enjoying much the same grade of
life,--such as prevailed in a large measure in the earlier times, and
decreasingly as society has become industrial,--and so far also as the
new acquirements of thought are transformed into practical life and
common language, all the members of th