108 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 



individuals of a community, and is actually an important factor in 

 rendering the community efficient in holding its own in the struggle with 

 other communities. 



When once the pupil has fully grasped the three great primary facts 

 I have mentioned, he can profitably pass on to elementary notions of the 

 biology of communal life. Gateways leading to these may be found by 

 way of the fascinating phenomena presented by communities of social 

 insects such as bees and ants and termites. Still better in some ways is 

 the study of cell-communities, culminating in the immensely complex 

 cell-communities that constitute the bodies of the higher animals. By 

 whichever route, the pupil is easily led to the three great principles of 

 communal evolution : (1) increase in the size of the community, (2) 

 increased specialisation of its constituent individuals, (3) increased per- 

 fection of the organisation by which the constituent individuals are knit 

 together into the communal indi\aduality of a higher order. In some 

 animal communities this organisation is of a material kind, the individuals 

 being linked together by strands of living substance, in others the connection 

 is not material but is of the nature of social interrelationships. 



When once these basic principles are clearly apprehended an approach 

 may profitably be made to the study of human society, where the same 

 principles are seen clearly at work — the simple nomadic group with its 

 individuals few in number, showing hardly any trace of specialisation, and 

 so loosely knit together that they separate from one another under stress 

 of circumstances, such as attack by a hostile tribe — leading up to the 

 complex modern civilised State with its millions of inhabitants, intensely 

 specialised for the performance of the various communal functions, and 

 knit together by an immensely complex social organisation. 



The Intercommunal Struggle. 



The appreciation of the fact that our civilised community has come 

 about by a long process of social evolution paves the way to an aj^pre- 

 ciation of the further fact that human societies are still in process of 

 evolution — States becoming larger and larger, the specialisation of their 

 citizens becoming ever more pronounced, their social organisation more 

 complicated — and that here again a great dri\ang force is the struggle for 

 existence, in this case an intercommunal struggle. 



It is surely one of the saddest experiences a biologist can have, to live 

 amongst men whose communal evolution has lagged behind, and to see how, 

 unless helped in their struggle with competitors at a higher level of social 

 evolution by some natural protective feature such as geographical isolation 

 or immunity to local diseases, they are doomed to disappear. Innumerable 

 examples of this are seen in the continents of the New World, where the 

 relatively primitive communities of red men have been displaced by whites 

 in a higher stage of communal evolution. The same process has taken 

 place in the past, races that lagged behind in their communal evolution 

 giving place to others more progressive. 



The realisation of the importance of intercommunal and interracial 

 competition is of use indirectly as a safeguard against falling into the 

 common error of ignoring differences — in material interests, in racial 

 prejudices, in religious beliefs — ^those troublesome factors which, in actual 



