r and larger social units. For within the limits of the family
competition tends to be replaced by mutual helpfulness, and not only
are the loneliness and horror of the struggle between isolated
individuals banished, but, what is vastly more, the family becomes
the school of unselfishness and love. And what has thus become true
of the single family, and groups of nearly related families, is
slowly being realized in the larger units of communities and
states. For, as families and communities are just as really
organisms as are the individual men and women, whose soundness
depends upon the healthy activity of every organ, so there is a
survival, first of families, then of communities and rival
civilizations, in proportion to their unity and soundness in every
part. For on account of the close bonds of family and social life,
and in connection with the development of articulate speech, a new
kind of heredity, so to speak, arises, of vast importance for both
good and evil. This mental and moral heredity, over-leaping all
boundaries of blood and natural kinship, spreads light and good
influence or an immoral contagion through the community. And thus,
in sheer self-defence, society passes laws setting limits to the
oppression of the poor and weak, lest, degraded and brutalized, they
become breeding centres of physical and moral disease in the
community. The positive lesson that the surest mode of self-defence
is the elevation of these submerged classes, we are just beginning
to learn and apply.

By the ever-increasing acceleration of the development the gap
between man and the lower animal widens with wonderful rapidity. Of
course it is only in man, and higher man, that these last and
highest results of mammalian structure appear. But that, far removed
as they are, they are the results of mammalian and vertebrate
characteristics cannot, I think, be well denied. And this is only
one of innumerably possible illustrations of the fact that all our
most highly prized institutions are rooted far back in our ancestry,
often ineradicably in the very organs of our bodies. And thus
evolution, which many view only from its radical side--and it has a
radical side--is really the conservative bulwark of all that is
essentially worth possessing in the past.

But every factor in man's development tends toward intellectual and
spiritual development. Man's vast increase of brain; his finely
balanced body; his upright gait; setting his hands