owth in the recognition
of the sacredness of life and the obligation to other individuals, can
be traced historically as a long and confused process. There was a
time, in the remote past, when no law was recognized except that of the
strong arm. The man who wanted anything, took it, if he was strong
enough, and others submitted to his superior force. Then follows an age
when the family is the supreme social unit. Each member of the family
group feels the pain or pleasure of all the others as something like his
own, but all outside this circle are as the beasts. This is the
condition among the Veddahs of Ceylon, studied so interestingly by
Haeckel. Living in isolated family groups, scattered through the
tropical wilderness: one man, one woman and their children forming the
social unit: they as nearly represent primitive life as any other body
of people now on the earth.

Then follows a long roll of ages when the tribe is the highest social
unit. Each member of the tribe is conscious of the sacredness of life of
all the other members and of some obligation toward them; but men of
other tribes may be slain as freely as the beasts. Then comes a period
when appreciation of the sacredness of life is extended over all those
of the same race, tested generally by their speaking somewhat the same
language. That was the condition in classic antiquity: it was "Jew and
Gentile," "Greek and barbarian"--the very word "barbarous" coming from
the unintelligible sounds, to the Greeks, of those who spoke other than
the Hellenic tongue. Even Plato, with all his far-sighted humanism,
says, in the _Republic_, that in the ideal state, "Greeks should deal
with barbarians as Greeks now deal with one another." If one remembers
what occurred in the Peloponnesian war--how Greek men voted to kill all
the men of military age in a conquered Greek city and sell all the women
and children into slavery--one will see that Plato's dream of humanity
was not so very wide.

From that time on, there has been further extension of the appreciation
of the sacredness of life and of the consciousness of moral obligation
toward other human beings. We are far from the end of the path. Our
sympathies are still limited by accidents of time and place, race and
color; but we have gone far enough to see what the end would be, were we
to reach it: a sympathy so wide, an appreciation of the sacredness of
life so universal, that each of us would feel the joy or