brother and helper of all, and the universal standard
of life would be: Each for all and all for each! How ardently we
desire that this were so; how eagerly we pray for that future, so far
away, when we shall have grown to this nobler stature, and the
present fratricidal struggle shall have given place to a lasting
peace, the offspring of a higher, spiritual, universal love. Anxiously
do we await it; like lost travellers, we fix our eyes on the dark
horizon to catch the first faint streaks of light, harbingers of the
dawn. We greet with joy and gratitude all such as believe in that
blessed future and endeavour to hasten its coming, all who
impersonally and in sincerity aim at the social Unity towards which
the heart aspires, and especially those whose aim it is to advance in
accordance with that continuous, progressive evolution based on the
physical, moral, mental, and spiritual amelioration of men, for it is
they who have learned the secret of Nature. Indeed, evolution shows us
that, the more souls grow, the nearer they approach that perfection to
which progress destines them, and happiness exists only in perfection.

To return to other aspects of the subject.

Men are born equal, we are told.

A single glance at the differences in the moral and intellectual
qualities of races and individuals, at the differences between young
children, even at the differences in the instincts of infants at the
breast, is sufficient to prove the contrary.

There are savages in whom no trace whatever of the moral sense can be
discovered. Charles Darwin in one of his works relates a fact, which
Mrs. Besant has quoted, in illustration of this. An English missionary
reproached a Tasmanian with having killed his wife in order to eat
her. In that rudimentary intellect, the reproach aroused an idea quite
different from that of a crime; the cannibal thought the missionary
imagined that human flesh was of an unpleasant flavour, and so he
replied: "But she was very good!"

Is it possible to attribute to the influence of surroundings alone a
degree of moral poverty so profound as this?

Many a mother has been able to find out that souls are not equal, in
other words, that they are of different ages, by the discovery of
diametrically opposite qualities and tendencies in two children born
under the same conditions; in twins, for instance.

Every schoolmaster has noticed the same fact in the pupils under his
charge. Mrs. Besant says that am