The “one-child family” is now generally recognized as one of the characteristic social situations in which egocentric behavior is likely to manifest itself. It is certain that parents, just because of their solicitude for the welfare of their offspring, are not always safe companions for them. However that may be today, it is certain that in the past it was within the limits of the family group that most of the traits which we may describe as human were originally developed. Outside the circle of the family and the neighborhood, within which intimate and the so-called “primary relations” are maintained, there is the larger circle of influences we call the community; the local community, and then the larger, organized community, represented by the city and the nation. And out beyond the limits of these there are beginning to emerge the vast and vague outlines of that larger world-community which Graham Wallas has described under the title, _The Great Society_. The community, then, is the name that we give to this larger and most inclusive social milieu, outside of ourselves, our family, and our immediate neighborhood, in which the individual maintains not merely his existence as an individual, but his life as a person. The community, including the family, with its wider interests, its larger purposes, and its more deliberate aims, surrounds us, incloses us, and compels us to conform; not by mere pressure from without, not by the fear of censure merely, but by the sense of our interest in, and responsibility to, certain interests not our own. The sources of our actions are, no doubt, in the organic impulses of the individual man; but actual conduct is determined more or less by public opinion, by custom, and by a code which exists outside of us in the family, in the neighborhood, and in the community. This community, however, with its less immediate purposes and its more deliberate aims, is always more or less outside of, and alien to, us; much more so than the family, for example, or any other congenial group. This is to such an extent true that certain sociological writers have conceived society as having an existence quite independent of the individuals who compose it at any given time. Under these circumstances the natural condition of the individual in society is one of conflict; conflict with other individuals, to be sure, but particularly conflict with the conventions and regulations of the social group of which he is a member. Personal freedom—self-expression, as we have learned to call it in recent years—is, therefore, if not a fruitless, still a never ending, quest. Only gradually, as he succeeds in accommodating himself to the life of the larger group, incorporating into the specific purposes and ambitions of his own life the larger and calmer purposes of the society in which he lives, does the individual man find himself quite at home in the community of which he is a part.