The family is the first and fundamental of all higher social and political unities.  And without the persistence of the family the larger social unit would become an inert mass.  All the individual ambition, all desire for family advancement, must be retained as still a motive for energetic advance.  And all the training which social life can give reaches the individual most effectively, or solely, through the family.  Society without the family would be like an army without company or regimental organization.  Thus the very existence, not only of training in love and mutual helpfulness, but even of society itself as a mere organization, depends upon the existence and improvement of family life.  And as so much depended upon and resulted from it, it could not but be fostered and improved by natural selection.  The tribe or race with the best family life has apparently survived.  But all social animals have some means of communicating very simple thoughts or perceptions.  The simplest illustrations of this are the calls and warning cries of mammals and birds.  It is not impossible that the higher mammals have something worthy of the name of language.  But man alone, with his better brain and better anatomical structure of throat and mouth, and the closer interdependence with his fellows, has attained to articulate speech.  And this again has become the bond to a still closer union.

Now our only question is, How does social life enable and aid man to conform to environment?  We are interested not so much in his happiness as in his progress.  It helps and improves the body by giving him a better and more constant supply of more suitable food, and better protection from inclemency of the weather, and in many other ways.  Baths and gymnasia are built, and medical science prolongs life.  Yet make the items as many as you can, and what a long list of disadvantages to man physically you must set over against these.  Many of these evils will doubtless disappear as society becomes better organized, but some will always remain to plague us.  We pamper or abuse our stomachs, and dyspepsia results.  We live in hot-houses, and a host of diseases are fostered by them.  Indeed it would be hard to count up the diseases for which social life is directly or indirectly responsible.  Social life becomes more and more complicated, and our nervous systems cannot bear the strain.  Medical science saves alive thousands who would otherwise die, and these grow up to bear children as weak as themselves.  We are looking now at the physical side alone; and from this standpoint the survival of the invalid is a sore evil.  Now society will and must become healthier; we shall not always abuse our bodies as sinfully as we now do.  Still, viewed from the standpoint of the body alone, the best, as it seems to me, which we can claim, is that social life does no more harm than good.