Of the social animals, man presents the most complete type, and the one from which we can best deduce the conditions of the class. A human community is made up of individuals of many degrees of intellectual ability, the mass remaining at a low level, the few attaining a high level. Yet those of high powers of intellect set the standard for the whole, teach the lower either by precept or example, and aid effectively in advancing the standard of the community. A rope or chain is said to be as weak as its weakest part. A human community, on the contrary, may be said to be as strong as its strongest part. The standing of the whole is dependent upon the thoughts and acts of the few, from whom the general mass receive new ideas and gain new habits. The existing intellectual and industrial position of mankind is very largely a result of ideas evolved by individuals age after age, and preserved as the mental property of the whole. Destroy the books and works of art and industry of any community, cut off its intellectual leaders, remove from the general mind the results of education, and it would at once fall back to a low level and be obliged to begin again its slow climb upward. The intellectual standing of any civilized nation depends upon two things: the preservation in books, in memory, and in works of art and industry, of the ideas of ancient workers and thinkers; and the mental activity of living thinkers and inventors, whose work takes its start from this standpoint of stored-up thought. Rob any community of all its basic ideas, and it would quickly retrograde to a primitive condition of thought and organization, from which it might need many centuries to emerge. It has been said above that man is the highest example of the social animal. While that is the truth, it is not the whole truth. He is at the same time the highest example of the communal animal. Mutual aid, organization into strictly rounded communities, labor for the good of the whole, is as declared in him as in the most developed community of the ants, and we admire the work of the latter simply because they repeat at a lower level the work of man. In truth, in man we have a splendid example of the existence of the individual initiative in connection with the communal organization. Specialism exists in a hundred forms. Some nations have been tied down by it to conditions almost as fixed as those of the ants. But generalism exists in as full a measure, new ideas are constantly modifying or replacing the old, and the communism of man is a progressive one, steadily borne upward on the wings of new ideas. Individual thought has the fullest swing, and it is to the system of special reward for useful thought and act that man owes much of his great advance. On the other hand, reward without useful service has been one of the leading agencies that have acted to check human progress.