We have seen how this is the case with regard to his own family; but the matter does not end there. Individual households do not live in isolation; and there are for this fact two closely allied reasons. If they did there could be no marriage; there could also be nothing like social intercourse. It is social intercourse of a more or less extended kind that alone makes possible, not only love and marriage, but most of the pleasures that give colour to life. We see this in all ranks and in all stages of civilisation. Savages meet together in numerous groups to dance, like civilised men and women in New York or in London. The feast, or the meal eaten by a large gathering, is one of the most universal of all human enjoyments. But in all such cases the enjoyment involves one thing--namely, a certain similarity, underlying individual differences, between those persons who take part in it. Intimate social intercourse is, as a rule, possible only between those who are similar in their tastes and ideas with regard to the minute details which for most of us make up the tesserae of life's daily mosaic--similar in their manners, in their standards of beauty and comfort, in their memories, their prospects, or (to be brief) in what we may call their class habituations. This is true of all men, be their social position what it may. It is true, of course, that the quality of a man's life, as a whole, depends on other things also, of a wider kind than these. It depends not only on the fact, but also on his consciousness of the fact, that he is a citizen of a certain state or country, though with most of its inhabitants he will never exchange a word; or that he is a member of a certain church; or that, being a man and not a monkey, his destiny is identified with that of the human species. But, so far as his enjoyment of private wealth is concerned, each man as a rule, though to this there are individual exceptions, enjoys it mainly through the life of his own _de facto_ class--the people whose manners and habits are more or less similar to his own, because they result from the possession of more or less similar means. He is, therefore, not interested in the permanence of his own wealth only. He is equally interested in the permanence of the wealth of a body of men, the life of which must, like that of all corporations, be continuous.