combine with each other by the pressure of human enemies, others by inhospitable natural surroundings. The latter has been the case with the Eskimos. Where the instinct of association and mutual help has been most strongly developed, there has the community's power of maintaining itself been greatest, and it has increased in numbers and in well-being; while other small communities, with less of this instinct, have declined or even succumbed altogether.
In so far as we believe with Spencer that the religion of friendship is that of the future, that self-sacrifice for the benefit of the community is the point towards which development is tending, we must assign to the Eskimo a high place in the scale of nations.
It is a question, however, whether our forefathers also, in long bygone ages, did not act upon a similar principle. It may be that social development proceeds in a spiral with ever wider and wider convolutions.
