33^ Mutual Aid as a Law of Nature 



our own times, the total abandonment of revenge, or 

 of "due reward " — of good for good and evil for evil — • 

 is affirmed more and more vigorously. The higher 

 conception of "no revenge for wrongs," and of freely 

 giving more than one expects to receive from his 

 neighbours, is proclaimed as being the real principle 

 of morality — a principle superior to mere equivalence, 

 equity, or justice, and more conducive to happiness. 

 And man is appealed to, to be guided in his acts, not 

 merely by love, which is always personal, or at the best 

 tribal, but by the perception of his oneness with each 

 human being. In the practice of mutual aid, which 

 we can retrace to the earliest beginnings of evolution, 

 we thus find the positive and undoubted origin of our 

 ethical conceptions; and we can affirm that in the 

 ethical progress of man, mutual support — not mutual 

 struggle — has had the leading part. In its wide ex- 

 tension, even at the present time, we also see the best 

 guarantee of a still loftier evolution of our race,^ 



' Kropotkin, Mutual Aid a Factor of Evolution, pp. 299-300. 



