The theory of a social contract, as a historical or prehistorical event in the development of any community, has long been rightly discredited: at no time did a number of men, living solitary lives, have a public meeting and formally contract to live together on certain conditions and for certain ends. Man has been a gregarious, if not social, animal from the beginning. Nevertheless, man has certain needs, desires, and ends which can only be satisfied by means of social organisation, and which are quite as potent in holding society together as if, instead of being tacitly at work, they had been proclaimed aloud in a formal social contract. If through any disease the social organism obstructs, or fails to assist in realising, those ends, the dissatisfaction of the individual and the danger to the state are just as great as if a formal contract had been violated: the disappointment of the normal and reasonable expectations of the members of the community is substantially injustice, and is not altogether erroneously stated to be a violation of the common and tacit understanding on which society is in fact if not formally established. Co-operation in labour does imply some sort of engagement, expressed or understood, that the joint product shall be divided more or less fairly between the joint producers. Unfairness in the distribution of social benefits may be of slow growth, but must eventually result in undisguised resentment--appeal is made openly and consciously to justice, which henceforth becomes the ideal of a section at least of the community, and is recognised as a condition without which a healthy social existence is impossible. It is thus a monstrous perversion of the plain facts to represent the struggle for existence as having been the sole or the main factor in social evolution: every member of a community is born into an atmosphere of co-operation and maintains his existence by the co-operation of others. If he must labour to live, he cannot labour for himself without at the same time rendering service to others; the very same conditions which make him desire justice for himself constrain him to maintain justice for the community at large. The social environment is, and has always been, such as to lead man in the paths of justice and to train him for the service of his fellow-man. The units which constitute the social environment are men, beings whose physical, mental, and moral structure is the result of a long process of evolution stretching back to beyond the beginnings of life upon this earth, a process which, assuming it to have had purpose, was designed to include in its effects a creature capable of justice and of love.