Though cut off like the finger, he does not instantly deliquesce and disappear. His connection with the society which evolved him being severed, he may continue to live as an animal, but is in process of decay as a human being; he is an ex-man. Our connection is so subtle, so fluent, each human brain being so large a storage battery of social energy, that we can separate for a time with no loss. But make the separation complete and the humanness dies. We have been deterred also from seeing the larger and more vital human relation by the smaller and more arbitrary. Perhaps the most conspicuous of these is the Family, often called the Unit of the State. Now the family is not a distinctively human relation at all; many varieties of animals, especially among the higher carnivora, have families, with monogamic union, too, where devoted parents strive and suffer to provide for and protect their young. A perfectly normal and necessary group is the family, and one proved best for successful reproduction of the species, but not a social unit at all. The individual is the social unit, combining to develop the structure and functions of Society. Families never combine, they can’t. Families take no part in social relation. Each family has its own structure and functions, its own interests, its own purposes, and these are frequently in direct opposition to the social good. Just as Society offers a surer, safer, higher life to the individual, and thus makes possible that inordinate egoism which is so serious a danger; so it gives the same opportunity to the family and allows of a wider, deeper, and more intense familism than is possible among sub-social animals. It is most interesting to watch the slow struggle of the true social relation to establish and extend itself against these natural obstacles, as in the successive overthrow of Patriarchism and Feudalism by the State. The City as a social group has much easier recognition with us than larger entities. Civic consciousness began early and found its splendid flower and fruit, as well as its iron limitations, in Greece. National consciousness is now quite well established, having the same advantages and disadvantages as the Civic, only on larger scale. To-day we are beginning to feel the largest consciousness of all, the truly Human, in whose unbounded growth and beautifully progressive development the petty limitations of all earlier forms are slowly disappearing. “What are your national distinctions?” an inquiring Englishman asked me. “The time is past for national distinctions,” I replied. “The time is coming for the people of the world, and Americans are the first of them.”