r its cohesion upon the affinities and attractions, and not
_vice versa_. My interests are strongest where my power of action
is greatest. The love of mothers for children is a force of essential
value, and therefore to be cultivated rather than repressed, for no
force known to us could replace it. And what is pre-eminently true in
this case is, of course, true to a degree in others. Burke stated this
with admirable force in his attack upon the revolutionists who
expounded the opposite principle of abstract equality. "To be attached
to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society,
is the first principle," he says, "the germ, as it were, of public
affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed
towards a love to our country and mankind." The assertion that they
desired to invert this order, to destroy every social link in so far as
it tended to produce inequalities, was the pith of his great indictment
against the French "metaphysical" revolutionists. They had perverted
the general logical precept of the sufficient reason for all
inequalities by converting it into an assuming of the equality of
concrete units. They fell into the fallacy of which I have spoken; and
many radicals, utilitarians, and others have followed them. They
assumed that all the varieties of human character, or all those due to
the influence of the social environment, through whose structure and
inherited instincts every full-grown man has been moulded, might be
safely disregarded for the purpose of political and social
construction. They have spoken, in brief, as if men were the equal and
homogeneous atoms of physical inquiry and social problems capable of
solution by a simple rearrangement of the atoms in different orders,
instead of remembering that they are dealing with a complex organism,
in which not only the whole order but every constituent atom is also a
complex structure of indefinitely varying qualities. In the recognition
of this truth lies, as I believe, the true secret of any satisfactory
method of treatment.

Does this fact justify inequality in general? Or does not the principle
of equality still remain as essentially implied in the Utopia which we
all desire to construct? We have to take it for granted that to each
man the first and primary moving instinct is and must be the love of
the little "platoon" of which he is a member; that the problem is, not
to destroy all these minor attractions, t