apable of wishing to be so, but this is
impossible. Communities of ants can only exist on the basis of the
social instinct of labor and mutual support, without which they would
immediately disappear.

=Egoism and the Rights of Groups in Man. Human Rights.=--The notions
of the rights of groups in man are infinitely more complicated and
more difficult to understand. As we have already seen, the most
primordial instinctive sentiment in man is limited to his family and
his immediate surroundings. But here even it leaves much to be
desired. Family disputes, quarrels between brothers and sisters are
frequent enough; parricide, fratricide and infanticide are not rare.
In addition to this, beyond the narrow circle of the family, disputes,
hatred between individuals, deception, robbery and many worse things
are always the order of the day. In struggles between parties and
classes, in the abuse of privileges of caste and fortune, in war, in
commerce, in a word in everything, private interests of egoism take
precedence of the general interests of humanity.

These facts, and a thousand other pitiable phenomena of the same kind
in human society, bear witness to the egoistic and rapacious nature of
man, which proves how little the social instinct is developed in his
brain. Human society is founded much more on custom and tradition,
imposed by the force of circumstances, than on nature. Human infants
resemble kittens at first much more than young social beings. In
primitive times, when the earth appeared large to man, the rights of
groups were limited to small communities which looked upon other men,
the same as animals and plants, as legitimate prey. Cannibalism and
even the chase show clearly that man began by becoming more rapacious
and more carnivorous than his pithecanthropoid ancestor, and his
cousin the ape of the present day.

It is only later, after the progressive enlargement of stronger
communities at the expense of weaker; still later, when man commenced
to comprehend the sufferings for the community which result from the
autocracy and passion for unlimited pleasure of a few persons;
finally, when he discovered the narrow limits of the earth, that
notions of humanity and humanitarianism, that is to say the sentiment
of human solidarity, were able to develop in the general conscience.
It was, however, one of the ancients who said "I am a man and nothing
human can be strange to me." But in his time, as in that of Jesus
C