Despite the want of feeling in which the Stoics gloried, it is yet true to say that the humanity of their system constitutes one of its most just claims on our admiration. They were the first fully to recognise the worth of man as man; they heralded the reign of peace for which we are yet waiting; they proclaimed to the world the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man; they were convinced of the solidarity of mankind, and laid down that the interest of one must be subordinated to that of all. The word "philanthrop," though not unheard before their time, was brought into prominence by them as a name for a virtue among the virtues. Aristotle's ideal state, like the Republic of Plato, is still an Hellenic city; Zeno was the first to dream of a republic which should embrace all mankind. In Plato's Republic all the material goods are contemptuously thrown to the lower classes, all the mental and spiritual reserved for the higher. In Aristotle's ideal the bulk of the population are mere conditions, not integral parts of the state. Aristotle's callous acceptance of the existing fact of slavery blinded his eyes to the wider outlook, which already in his time was beginning to be taken. His theories of the natural slave and of the natural nobility of the Greeks are mere attempts to justify practice. In the Ethics there is indeed a recognition of the rights of man, but it is faint and grudging. Aristotle there tells us that a slave, as a man, admits of justice, and therefore of friendship, but unfortunately it is not this concession which is dominant in his system, but rather the reduction of a slave to a living tool by which it is immediately preceded. In another passage Aristotle points out that men, like other animals, have a natural affection for the members of their own species, a fact, he adds, which is best seen in travelling. This incipient humanitarianism seems to have been developed in a much more marked way by Aristotle's followers, but it is the Stoics who have won the glory of having initiated humanitarian sentiment.