THE ORIGIN OF SOCIAL MORALITY How early was social morality developed? By social morality we mean, concretely, such virtues as tender and fostering love, sympathy, obedience, subordination of selfish instincts to group-demands, the service of other individuals or of the group. These habits are later in development than some of the personal virtues, but long antedate the differentiation of man from the other animals. Instances of self-sacrificing devotion of parent to offspring among birds and beasts are too common to need mention. Devotion to the mate, though less developed, is early present in many species. The strict subordination of ants and bees to the common welfare is a well-known marvel, the latter enthusiastically and poetically described by Maeterlinck in his delightful Life of the Bees. The stern requirements of obedience to the unwritten laws of the herd, which make powerful so many species of animals individually weak, are graphically, though of course with exaggeration, set forth by Kipling in his Jungle Book. Many sorts of animals, such as deer and antelopes, might long ago have been exterminated but for their mutual cooperation and service. Affection and sympathy in high degree are evident in some sub-human species. When we come to man, we find his earliest recorded life based upon a social morality which, if crude, was in some respects stricter than that of today. It is a mistake to think of the savage as Rousseau imagined him, a freehearted, happy-go-lucky individualist, only by a cramping civilization bowed under the yoke of laws and conventions. Savage life is essentially group-life; the individual is nothing, the tribe everything. The gods are tribal gods, warfare is tribal warfare, hunting, sowing, harvesting, are carried on by the community as a whole. There are few personal possessions, there is little personal will; obedience to the tribal customs, and mutual cooperation, are universal. [Footnote: As an example of the solidarity of barbarous tribes, note how Abimelech, seeking election as king, says to "all the men of Shechem": "Remember that I am your bone and your flesh." (Judges IX, 2.) Later, "all the tribes of Israel" say to David, "Behold, we are thy bone and thy flesh." (2 Sam. V, 1.) Of savage life as observed in modern times we have many reports like this: "Many strange customs and laws obtain in Zululand, but there is no moral code in all the world more rigidly observed than that of the Zulus." (R. H. Millward, quoted by Myers, History as Past Ethics, p. 11.) Compare this: "A Kafir feels that the 'frame that binds him in' extends to the clan. The sense of solidarity of the family in Europe is thin and feeble compared to the full-blooded sense of corporate union of the Kafir clan. The claims of the clan entirely swamp the rights of the individual." (Kidd, Savage Childhood, p. 74.) An elaborate and stern social morality, then, long preceded verbally formulated