226 DEVELOPMENT AND PURPOSE CHAP. 



takes functions previously left to the individual, the family 

 or some other body. This is a fuller recognition of a 

 common collective responsibility. These two elements, 

 personal right and common responsibility for mutual aid> 

 are the two pivotal points of social ethics, and with regard 

 to their relations generally we may say that in the kinship 

 society the individual has little scope for development apart 

 from the common life ; in the authoritarian society his life 

 is usually determined in its main outlines by his status, 

 nor has he any standing ground save that of force for 

 resistance to law and constituted authority. The same is 

 at bottom true of the ancient state, where the subjection 

 of the individual to the common weal is an undisputed 

 axiom. In the modern world there first appeared the con- 

 ception that the right of the individual as such might limit 

 the law, and this is not merely a conception but a regulative 

 principle in much modern legislation. But it is a principle 

 which has in turn to be checked by the complementary 

 truth that the rights which the individual can claim must be 

 constituent conditions of a self-consistent social order, and 

 to base liberty on law and the common life on liberty is the 

 specific problem of contemporary statesmanship. 



Thus, looking through social development as a whole, 

 we observe first tne development of an organ of social 

 control and the increasing efficacy of ideas in the organisa- 

 tion of life ; secondly, the equalisation of rights and duties, 

 and the consequent destruction of many of the barriers that 

 divide mankind ; lastly, the development of the principles 

 of personality on the one side, and of collective responsi- 

 bility on the other. But these are the general conditions of 

 social co-operation, the essence of which lies in the recon- 

 ciliation of free growth, whether in the individual person- 

 ality or in the family or in any form of collective life, with 

 organised and disciplined effort for the advancement of the 

 race. Thus, taking each side of law, custom and govern- 

 ment in turn, we find that the net movement is to contri- 

 bute the appropriate condition to the realisation of the 

 ethical ideal. 



7. But this net result is arrived at in many cases by very 



