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.

The process of absorption of smaller groups and their unification into
larger ones, when carried out completely in any land, tends to arrest
all further growth, not simply because there is no further room for
expansion by the absorption of other divergent tribes, but also
because the "cake of custom" is apt to become so hard, the uniformity
enforced on all the individuals is liable to b