All these facts show that a reckless prosecution of personal interests, with no regard to other people’s needs, is not the only characteristic of modern life.  By the side of this current which so proudly claims leadership in human affairs, we perceive a hard struggle sustained by both the rural and industrial populations in order to reintroduce standing institutions of mutual aid and support; and we discover, in all classes of society, a widely-spread movement towards the establishment of an infinite variety of more or less permanent institutions for the same purpose.  But when we pass from public life to the private life of the modern individual, we discover another extremely wide world of mutual aid and support, which only passes unnoticed by most sociologists because it is limited to the narrow circle of the family and personal friendship.(17)

Under the present social system, all bonds of union among the inhabitants of the same street or neighbourhood have been dissolved.  In the richer parts of the large towns, people live without knowing who are their next-door neighbours.  But in the crowded lanes people know each other perfectly, and are continually brought into mutual contact.  Of course, petty quarrels go their course, in the lanes as elsewhere; but groupings in accordance with personal affinities grow up, and within their circle mutual aid is practised to an extent of which the richer classes have no idea.  If we take, for instance, the children of a poor neighbourhood who play in a street or a churchyard, or on a green, we notice at once that a close union exists among them, notwithstanding the temporary fights, and that that union protects them from all sorts of misfortunes.  As soon as a mite bends inquisitively over the opening of a drain—­ “Don’t stop there,” another mite shouts out, “fever sits in the hole!” “Don’t climb over that wall, the train will kill you if you tumble down!  Don’t come near to the ditch!  Don’t eat those berries—­poison! you will die.”  Such are the first teachings imparted to the urchin when he joins his mates out-doors.  How many of the children whose play-grounds are the pavements around “model workers’ dwellings,” or the quays and bridges of the canals, would be crushed to death by the carts or drowned in the muddy waters, were it not for that sort of mutual support.  And when a fair Jack has made a slip into the unprotected ditch at the back of the milkman’s yard, or a cherry-cheeked Lizzie has, after all, tumbled down into the canal, the young brood raises such cries that all the neighbourhood is on the alert and rushes to the rescue.

Then comes in the alliance of the mothers.  “You could not imagine” (a lady-doctor who lives in a poor neighbourhood told me lately) “how much they help each other.  If a woman has prepared nothing, or could prepare nothing, for the baby which she expected—­and how often that happens!—­all the neighbours bring something for the new-comer.  One of the neighbours always takes care of the children,