310 THE EVOLUTION OF A FATHER. 



advantage on one side or the other determines health 

 or starvation, survival or extinction, the importance 

 of the first feeble effort at federation must be recog- 

 nized. Shoulder to shoulder has been the watchword 

 all through history of national development. Almost 

 from the very first, indeed, the Family and not the in- 

 dividual must have been the unit of Tribal life ; and as 

 Families grew more and more definite, they became 

 the recognized piers of the social structure and gave 

 a first stability to the race of men. 



But great as are the physical advantages of the 

 Family, the ethical uses, even in the early days of its 

 existence, place this institution at the head of all the 

 creations of Evolution. For the Family is not only 

 its greatest creation, but its greatest instrument for 

 further creation. The ethical changes begin almost 

 the moment it is formed. One immediate effect, for 

 instance, of the formation of Family groups was to 

 take off from any single individual the perpetual 

 strain of the Struggle for Life. The Family as a 

 whole must sometimes fight, but the responsibility 

 and the duty are now distributed, and those who were 

 once solely pre-occupied with the personal struggle 

 will have respites, during which other things will 

 occupy their minds. Attention thus called off from 

 environing enemies, the members of the Family will, 

 as it were, discover one another. New relations 

 among them will spring up, new adjustments to one 

 another's presence and to one another's needs, and 

 hitherto unknown elements of character will be grad- 

 ually called to the surface. That unselfishness, in 

 some rude form, should now grow up is a necessity of 

 living together. A man cannot be a member of a 



