thy. When the curtain rises on our ancestor of eighty generations ago, he was a fierce, unruly savage living in constant warfare, a wild "blond beast" with little love for his kind. Undoubtedly the Teutonic temper has been toned down by the blood-letting of centuries. Through the Dark Ages, the mutual slaughter of untamed nobles and on- hangers cleared away the aggressive spirits and gave the more peaceable industrial type of man an opportunity to multiply the bonds of social life. But gentleness is still no silent trait of the European. In endowment for friendly association he is inferior to any one of half a score of races that might be mentioned. In the spontaneous formation of small, peaceable, natural communities the Buriats or the Tahitans leave him far behind. That he, nevertheless, continues ceaselessly to develop his wonderful social organization proves that his order rests upon something else than the social sentiments.
Natural affection, while it is not the main pillar of the social edifice, has, no doubt, the leading role in forming the family of to-day. It is sympathy, in the forms of sexual, parental, and conjugal love, that preserves and renews from generation to generation the family relations. Besides these services sympathy is valuable to the social group as a stimulus to beneficence. With its timely help it mitigates the vicissitudes of the individual life, averts the stroke of misfortune, lessens the smart of disaster, tones down the harsher inequalities of lot, and
for the weaker ones, such as women, widows, children, and the aged, softens the rigor of individualistic competition. In its collective manifestation sympathy fixes the legal status of the feeble and defective classes, and determines the plane of comfort they shall enjoy at public expense. Moreover, it authori-
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