re it dawned upon primitive men, who fled from each other,
or fought when they met at the mouth of their caverns, that they would
do well to form into groups, and unite in defence against the mighty
enemies who threatened them from without. And besides, these "ideas"
of the species will often be widely different from those that the
wisest man might hold. They would seem to be independent, spontaneous,
often based on facts of which no trace is shown by the human reason of
the epoch that witnessed their birth; and indeed there is no graver or
more disturbing problem before the moralist or sociologist than that of
determining whether all his efforts can hasten by one hour or divert by
one hair's-breadth the decisions of the great anonymous mass which
proceeds, step by step, towards its indiscernible goal.

Long ago--so long indeed that this is one of the first affirmations of
science when, quitting the bowels of the earth, the glaciers and
grottoes, it ceased to call itself geology and palaeontology and became
the history of man--humanity passed through a crisis not wholly unlike
that which now lies ahead of it, or is actually menacing it at the
moment; the difference being only that in those days the dilemma seemed
vastly more tragic and more unsolvable. It may truly be said that
mankind never has known a more perilous or more decisive hour, or a
period when it drew nearer its ruin; and the fact that we exist to-day
would appear to be due to the unexpected expedient which saved the race
at the moment when the scourge that fed on man's very reason, on all
that was best and most irresistible in his instinct of justice and
injustice, was actually on the point of destroying the heroic
equilibrium between the desire to live and the possibility of living.

I refer to the acts of violence, rapine, outrage, murder, which were of
natural occurrence among the earliest human groups. These crimes,
which will probably have been of the most frightful description, must
have very seriously endangered the existence of the race; for vengeance
is the terrible, and, as it were, the epidemic form which the craving
for justice at first assumes. Now this spirit of vengeance, abandoned
to itself and forever multiplying--revenge followed by the revenge of
revenge--would finally have engulfed, if not the whole of mankind, at
least all those of the earliest men who were possessed of energy or
pride. We find, however, that among these barbarou