approach, is apt to be
neglected. Such 'mere idealism', like pure benevolence, runs some risk
of being choked by the multiplicity of details and agencies and
organizations which beset the modern world. Humanity, as an idea, was
perhaps more easily apprehended in the days of Turgot and Condorcet than
it is with us when the implements of a united mankind have been
immeasurably augmented and improved. All the greater, then, the need to
re-integrate the notion. Just as in science the dispersive effect of
specialism has led many thinkers to desire another order of minds
specially devoted to generalism, to knitting together the results of the
detailed investigations of others, so in conduct, morals and politics,
it is more and more imperative to recall men's minds, and, in the first
place, our own, to the large governing ideas by which after all our
lesser rules and objects must stand or fall. For who will dispute that
all our alliances and international action and the war itself can only
be ultimately justified if they are seen to serve the highest interests
of mankind as a whole?

A volume, and a very valuable one, might be written on the evolution of
this idea of Humanity in history. We should need in the first place to
analyse, with some care, in what sense it is in each case used. There is
the simple sense of brotherhood such as we know to be deeply felt among
our allies in Russia. Of this there must have been germs from the
earliest appearance of mankind upon earth. It is one of those most
precious things which the development of wealth and class and
distinctive culture has tended to blunt in more elaborate civilizations.
But when we consider that the full conception of Humanity involves a
knowledge of man's evolution, his growth in power, and organization
throughout history, as well as the simple but indispensable sense of
man's brotherhood, we shall see how long a road the Russian moujik--as
well as multitudes of his fellows in all other lands--must travel before
he comes in view of the goal. In the fuller sense of a self-conscious
and developing being, the idea of Humanity first appears with the
Stoics, after the Greeks had put their leaven of abstract thought into
the world. The whole inhabited world as the City of Man was the Stoic
ideal, and it embraced both the idea of the [Greek: polis] which
Platonic and Aristotelian thought had reached in the fourth century
B.C., and the extension to the rest of mankind which