I will not here stop to dispute, though I am not sure that I could without some slight reservation admit, that the receipt of unasked-for benefits places the recipient under precisely the same obligation to benefit his benefactor, as if the good received by him had been conferred on express condition of his availing himself of the first opportunity to render equal good. I will not stop to dispute, for instance, that a person saved from drowning at the risk of his own rescuer's life, would be bound, on occasion arising, to risk his own life in order to save his former rescuer's. For my immediate purpose, it may suffice to remark that society has never been in the habit of showing such parental solicitude for its component members as would warrant its claiming filial devotion from them. In the matter of philanthropy its practice has never been in advance of its very moderate professions. It has invariably contented itself with rendering certain specific services, never failing to exact in return fully equivalent services of each species. In candour, however, there must be admitted to be innumerable blessings not yet adverted to, including indeed most of those by the possession of which man is distinguished from brutes, for which he is in so far indebted to society that, but for the instrumentality of society, they would never have been his. Unless individuals had formed themselves into communities, civilization could have made no sensible progress: there could have been no considerable advances, material, intellectual, moral, or aesthetic. Not only should we have been destitute of all the comforts and luxuries that now surround us, we should have lacked also whatever cerebral development we have attained, together with all its concomitants and consequences; whatever of intelligence, or moral perceptiveness, or artistic taste we have to boast of. Still, though none of these faculties could have made much approach to maturity except under the shelter of society, they are not gifts of society. Without the help of a plough, land cannot be ploughed; but we do not therefore credit the ploughmaker with the achievements of the ploughman. Neither is society to take to itself praise because its members have made good use of the protection which, in consideration of stipulated services on their part, it has afforded them. Besides, whatever we inherit from society, we inherit from a society of members no longer in being. Let the dead come to life again, and it may then become us to examine their claims upon our gratitude, but we need not meanwhile confound past and present generations, nor our forefathers with our contemporaries. To the mass of these latter, at any rate, we are none of us indebted for our brains or our aptitudes of thought and feeling, and the circumstance of our being joint sharers with them in patrimony bequeathed by a common ancestry, affords no very obvious reason why our share of the