Mutual Aid the Foundation of Ethics 335 



principle appears in full. That mutual aid is the real 

 foundation of our ethical conceptions seems evident 

 enough. But whatever the opinions as to the first 

 origin of the mutual-aid feeling or instinct may be, — 

 whether a biological or a supernatural cause is ascribed 

 to it, — we must trace its existence as far back as to the 

 lowest stages of the animal world; and from these 

 stages we can follow its uninterrupted evolution, in 

 opposition to a number of contrary agencies, through 

 all degrees of human development, up to the present 

 time. Even the new religions which were born from 

 time to time — always at epochs when the mutual-aid 

 principle was falling into decay in the theocracies and 

 despotic States of the East, or at the decline of the 

 Roman Empire — even the new religions have only 

 reaffirmed that same principle. They found their 

 first supporters among the humble, in the lowest, 

 down-trodden layers of society, where the mutual-aid 

 principle is the necessary foundation of every-day 

 life ; and the new forms of union which were introduced 

 in the earliest Buddhist and Christian communities, 

 in the Moravian brotherhoods and so on, took the 

 character of a return to the best aspects of mutual 

 aid in early tribal life. 



Each time, however, that an attempt to return to 

 this old principle was made, its fundamental idea itself 

 was widened. From the clan it was extended to the 

 stem, to the federation of stems, to the nation, and 

 finally — in ideal at least — to the whole of mankind. 

 It was also refined at the same time. In primitive 

 Buddhism, in primitive Christianity, in the writings 

 of some of the Mussulman teachers, in the early move- 

 ments of the Reform, and especially in the ethical and 

 philosophical movements of the last century and of 



