of blood and natural kinship, spreads light and good influence or an immoral contagion through the community.  And thus, in sheer self-defence, society passes laws setting limits to the oppression of the poor and weak, lest, degraded and brutalized, they become breeding centres of physical and moral disease in the community.  The positive lesson that the surest mode of self-defence is the elevation of these submerged classes, we are just beginning to learn and apply.

By the ever-increasing acceleration of the development the gap between man and the lower animal widens with wonderful rapidity.  Of course it is only in man, and higher man, that these last and highest results of mammalian structure appear.  But that, far removed as they are, they are the results of mammalian and vertebrate characteristics cannot, I think, be well denied.  And this is only one of innumerably possible illustrations of the fact that all our most highly prized institutions are rooted far back in our ancestry, often ineradicably in the very organs of our bodies.  And thus evolution, which many view only from its radical side—­and it has a radical side—­is really the conservative bulwark of all that is essentially worth possessing in the past.

But every factor in man’s development tends toward intellectual and spiritual development.  Man’s vast increase of brain; his finely balanced body; his upright gait; setting his hands free from the work of locomotion that they might become the skilful servants of the mind; finally, articulate speech and social, and, above all, family, life, all tended in this same direction.

And this makes the great difficulty in assigning man his proper place in our systems of classification.  Our zooelogical classifications depend upon anatomical characteristics; and anatomically man belongs among the order primates.  But mental and moral values cannot be expressed in terms of anatomy, any more than we can speak of an idea of so many horse-power, and hence worth three or four ancestral dollars.  Hence, while from the zooelogical standpoint man is a primate, and while he is very probably descended from one of these, he has gradually risen above them mentally and spiritually, so that he stands as far above them as they above the lowest worm.  And this leads us to the consideration of man, not merely as a mammal, but as “Anthropos,” Homo sapiens, although he often degenerates into “Simia destructor.”

From what has just been said man’s pre-eminence cannot consist in any anatomical characteristic, even of the brain—­much less of thumb, forefinger, hand, or foot.  But man’s mental and moral characteristics (even though germs of these may be present in the animal), whether differing in degree or kind from theirs, raise his life to a totally different plane.  He lives in an environment of which the lower animal is as unconscious and ignorant as we of a fourth dimension of space.  He has the knowledge of abstract truth and goodness, of certain standards