And slowly man begins to apply the lessons learned in the family to other relations with partners, neighbors, and friends.  Slowly he discovers that an entirely selfish life defeats its own ends.  A voice within him tells him continually that love is better than selfishness and ministering better than being ministered unto.  It dawns upon him that it is against the nature of things that other people should be so selfish and grasping; a few begin to apply the moral to themselves, and a few of these to act accordingly.

And what a change the few steps which man has taken in this direction have wrought in his life.  Says Professor Huxley:  “In place of ruthless self-assertion it demands self-restraint, in place of thrusting aside or treading down all competitors, it requires that the individual shall not merely respect, but shall help his fellows; its influence is directed not so much to the survival of the fittest as to the fitting of as many as possible to survive.  It repudiates the gladiatoral theory of existence.”

It is a vast change from the “gladiatorial theory” to that of “mutual helpfulness.”  Call it a revolution, if you will.  Revolutions are not unheard of in the history of the animal kingdom any more than in human history.  We have seen, first, digestion and reproduction on the throne of animal organization, then muscle, and finally brain.  Each of these changes is in one sense a revolution.

A little before the summer solstice the earth is whizzing away from the sun; a few weeks later it is whizzing with equal rapidity in almost the opposite direction.  In the very nature of things it could not be otherwise.  But so silently and gradually does it come about that we never feel the reversal of the engine; indeed the engine has not been reversed at all.  Very similar is the change of the struggle of brute against brute to that of man for man.  Indeed human development seems now to be almost at such a solstice where the power that makes for love is almost exhausted in opposing the tendency toward selfishness.  We shall not always stay at the solstice; soon we shall make more rapid progress.  And unselfishness like the family relation is firmly rooted in mammalian structure.

And man owes almost everything to family life.  First the child gains the advantage of the parent’s experience.  He is educated by the parent.  In a few formative and receptive years he gains from the parent the results of centuries of human experience.  The process is thus cumulative, the investment bears compound interest.  And yet this is peculiar to man only in degree.  Have you never watched a cat train her kittens?  And the education of the child in the savage family is very incomplete.