What are we to understand by the Ethics of Coöperation? Can we find some external standard of unquestioned value or absolute duty by which to measure the three processes of society which we have named, dominance, competition, coöperation? Masters of the past have offered many such, making appeal to the logic of reason or the response of sentiment, to the will for mastery or the claim of benevolence. To make a selection without giving reasons would seem arbitrary; to attempt a reasoned discussion would take us quite beyond the bounds appropriate to this lecture. But aside from the formulations of philosophers, humanity has been struggling--often rather haltingly and blindly--for certain goods and setting certain sign-posts which, if they do not point to a highway, at least mark certain paths as blind alleys. Such goods I take to be the great words, liberty, power, justice; such signs of blind paths I take to be rigidity, passive acceptance of what is. But those great words, just because they are so great, are given various meanings by those who would claim them for their own. Nor is there complete agreement as to just what paths deserve to be posted as leading nowhere. Groups characterized by dominance, cut-throat competition, or coöperation, tend to work out each its own interpretations of liberty, power, justice; its own code for the conduct of its members. Without assuming to decide your choice, I can indicate briefly what the main elements in these values and codes are. The group of masters and servants will develop what we have learned to call a morality of masters and a morality of slaves. This was essentially the code of the feudal system. We have survivals of such a group morality in our code of the gentleman, which in England still depreciates manual labor, although it has been refined and softened and enlarged to include respect for other than military and sportsman virtues. The code of masters exalts liberty--for the ruling class--and resents any restraint by inferiors or civilians, or by public opinion of any group but its own. It has a justice which takes for its premise a graded social order, and seeks to put and keep every man in his place. But its supreme value is power, likewise for the few, or for the state as consisting of society organized and directed by the ruling class. Such a group, according to Treitschke, will also need war, in order to test and exhibit its power to the utmost in fierce struggle with other powers. It will logically honor war as good.