ong before the appearance of humanity.[250] If, however, we keep
strictly to our immediate mammalian traditions it may be said that the
earliest socialist community is the family, with its trinity of father,
mother, and child. The primitive family constitutes a group which is
conditioned by the needs of each member. Each individual is subordinated
to the whole. The infant needs the mother and the mother needs the
infant; they both need the father and the father needs both for the
complete satisfaction of his own activities. Socially and economically
this primitive group is a unit, and if broken up into its individual
parts these would be liable to perish.

However we may multiply our social unit, however we may enlarge and
elaborate it, however we may juggle with the results, we cannot disguise
the essential fact. At the centre of every social agglomeration, however
vast, however small, lies the social unit of the family of which each
individual is by himself either unable to live or unable to reproduce,
unable, that is to say, to gratify the two fundamental needs of hunger
and love.

There are many people who, while willing to admit that the family is, in
a sense, a composite social unit to which each part has need of the
other parts, so that all are mutually bound together, seek to draw a
firm line of distinction between the family and society. Family life,
they declare, is not irreconcilable with individualism; it is merely _un
egoisme a trois_. It is, however, difficult to see how such a
distinction can be maintained, whether we look at the matter
theoretically or practically. In a small country like Great Britain, for
instance, every Englishman (excluding new immigrants) is related by
blood to every other Englishman, as would become clearer if every man
possessed his pedigree for a thousand years back. When we remember,
further, also, that every nation has been overlaid by invasions, warlike
or peaceful, from neighbouring lands, and has, indeed, been originally
formed in this way since no people has sprung up out of the soil of its
own land, we must further admit that the nations themselves form one
family related by blood.

Our genealogical relation to our fellows is too remote and extensive to
concern us much practically and sentimentally, though it is well that we
should realize it. If we put it aside, we have still to remember that
our actual need of our fellows is not definitely to be distinguished
from the