self-sufficient man, and of teaching him to move in line with his fellow-men.  And this problem confronted not only mankind at the beginning, but it has also been the great problem of each successive stage.  After the individual has been taught to live with, to work with and for, and to love, his immediate kinsmen (in other words to merge his individual interests in those of the family, and to count the family interests of more importance than his own), the next step was to induce the family to look beyond its little world and be willing to work with and for neighboring families.  When, after ages of conflict, this step was in a measure secured and the family-tribe was fairly formed, this group in turn must be taught to take into its view a still larger group, the tribal nation.  Throughout the ages the constant problem has been the development of larger and larger communal groups.  This general process has been very aptly called by Mr. Bagehot the taming process.  The selfward thoughts and ambitions of the individual man have been thus far driven more and more into the background of fact, if not of consciousness.  The individual has been brought into vital and organic relations with ever-increasing multitudes of his fellow-men.  It is, therefore, pre-eminently a process of social or associational development.  It not only develops social relations in an ever-increasing scale, but also social qualities and ideals and desires.

Now this taming, this socializing process, has been successful because it has had back of it, always enforcing it, the law of the survival of the strongest.  What countless millions of men must have perished in the first step!  They consisted of the less fit; of those who would not, or did not, learn soon enough the secret of existence through permanent family union.  And what countless millions of families must have perished because they did not discover the way, or were too independent, to unite with kindred families in order to fight a common foe or develop a common food supply.  And still later, what countless tribes must have perished before the secret of tribal federation was widely accepted!  In each case the problem has been to secure the subordination of the interests of the smaller and local community to those of the larger community.  Death to self and life to the larger interest was often the condition of existence at all.  How slow men always have been and still are to learn this great lesson of history!

The method whereby this taming process has been carried on has been through the formation of increasingly comprehensive and rigid customs and ideas.  Through the development and continued existence of a common language, series of common customs, and sets of common ideas, unity was secured for the community; these, indeed, are the means whereby a group is transformed into a community.  As the smaller community gave way to the larger, so the local languages, customs, and ideas had to break up and become so far modified as to form a new bond of unity.  Until this unity was secured the new community was necessarily weak; the group easily broke up into its old constituent elements.  We here gain a glimpse into one reason why the development of large composite communities, uniting and for the most part doing away with smaller ones, was so difficult and slow.