the constant foe which the community has had to fight and exterminate has been the wanton, selfish individual.  Individualism of this type was the spontaneous contrast to the communal life, and was ever manifesting itself.  No age or race has been without it, nor ignorant of it.  As soon as the two principles became clearly contrasted in thought, therefore, because of his actual experience, man could conceive of individualism only as the antithesis to communalism; it was felt that the two were mutually destructive.  It inevitably followed that communalism as a principle was accepted and individualism condemned.  In their minds not only social order, but existence itself, was at stake.  And they were right.  Egoistic individualism is necessarily atomistic.  No society can long maintain its life as a unified and peaceful society, when such a principle has been widely accepted by its members.  The social ills of this and of every age largely arise from the presence of this type of men, who hold this principle of life.

If, therefore, after a fair degree of national unity has been attained, the higher stages of national evolution depend on the higher development of individualism, and if the only kind of individualism of which men can conceive is the egoistic, it becomes evident that further progress must cease.  Stagnation, or degeneration, must follow.  This is what has happened to nearly all the great nations and races of the world.  They progressed well up to a certain point.  Then they halted or fell back.  The only possible condition under which a new lease of progressive life could be secured by them was a new variety of individualism, which would unite the opposite and apparently contradictory poles of communalism and egoism, namely, communo-individualism.  Inconceivable though it be to those men and nations who have not experienced this type of life, it is nevertheless a fact, and a mighty factor in human and in national evolution.  In its light we are able to see that the communal life itself has not reached its fullest development until the individualistic principle has been not only recognized in thought, but exalted, both in theory and in fact, to its true and coordinate position beside the communal principle.  Only then does the nation become fully and completely organized.  Only then does the national organism contain within itself the means for an endless, because a self-sustained, life.

It is important to guard against a misunderstanding of the principles just enunciated which may easily arise.  In saying that the development of the individual has proceeded pari passu with that of the community, that every gain by the community has contributed directly to the development of the individual, I do not say that the communal profits are at once distributed among all the members of the group, or that the distribution is at all equal.  Indeed, such is far from the case.  Some few individuals seem to appropriate a large and unfair proportion of the communal bank