182 SOCIAL HEREDITY AND SOCIAL EVOLUTION 



individual, family, and race yield to the glory of the 

 fatherland. What influence is stronger than patriot- 

 ism, and what is patriotism except willingness to 

 sacrifice for one's native land? Millions of men 

 to-day will sacrifice everything they hold most dear 

 to defend from attack that fiction which they call 

 their country. But a country neither demands nor 

 appreciates sacrifice, and since it is easier for men to 

 yield self-interest to the demands of an individual 

 than to the fiction of a nation, even with our modern 

 nations and our great change in ideas of obligations, 

 the allegiance is commonly centered around a person. 

 The soldier fights for the king or the queen, and even 

 in republican nations it is frequently the love and 

 admiration for an individual statesman or general, or 

 sympathy with an oppressed people, that brings out 

 the heroic self-sacrifices. 



Centralization is possible only where self-interests 

 are subordinated to some central power, be it a man, 

 a church, or an idea. From this it follows that the 

 fundamental necessity for the development of civil- 

 ization has been some impulse that leads man to yield 

 some of his interests to others. This principle must 

 contain the secret which underlies the evolution of 

 human society. The question is not whether man 

 will yield allegiance to authority, but simply to what 

 he will yield allegiance — to a king, a church, a nation, 

 a party, a trust, a labor union, or some other cen- 

 tralizing force. 



Centralization Means Loss of Individual Freedom 



Among the lower orders of nature the individual 

 counts for absolutely nothing. Of course each indi- 

 vidual, so far as his own struggle for life is con- 



