402 THE FUTURE OF RELIGION AND MORALS. 



understood, pointing to the fact that the era of unmiti- 

 gated competition and individualism is being left behind. 

 Where competition has shown itself injurious, men are 

 giving it up. The community of interest in so many 

 departments of life is too evident, and the necessities of 

 mutual support and aid and protection too pressing, not 

 to produce a certain mutual understanding and merging 

 of destructive internal competition amongst the units 

 that compose a class, or who are associated in an interest. 

 That very sense of mutual dependence, and of a com- 

 munity of interest, to which all society owes its origin, 

 is now seen to be applicable to many subordinate classes 

 and groups and sections of a modern complex society, 

 applicable everywhere, in fact, where an interest common 

 to numbers, however few, may appear. In such cases men 

 seek, and they will seek yet more, to minimize hazard 

 and chance to the individuals, by making all associated 

 partners in a common fortune. But though men will 

 continue to do so more and more, as society progresses, 

 its necessity as well as its advantages being so obvious ; 

 yet they will not withal be able to dispense wholly with 

 competition, either amongst associations, or the united 

 interest, or nations, or even amongst individuals whose 

 interest, though common in certain respects, may yet be 

 incompatible in others with that of their fellows in their 

 own class or association. 



While man remains man, even in the extremest con- 

 ceivable type of a socialistic community, competition in 

 some form must continue amongst individuals ; as while 

 he remains an animal, however far he may have tran- 

 scended his lower animal origin, there must cling to him 

 some of his old selfish and sensual nature. He may 

 become a more social, a more intellectual, a more spiritual 

 being, his development moving forward on all these higher 



