But, on passing into the stage of settled societies of large extent, that is to say, as peoples passed from the stage of tribal organisation to that of national organisation, the evolution of the social disposition through the mortal conflict of groups must have tended to come to an end; because group selection became less active, the conflicts between the larger and less numerous societies or groups became rarer and also less fatal to the vanquished societies. In other words, during the historic period failure in conflict has not usually meant extermination; national cultures and the power and glory of nations have come and gone, but the various peoples, the units of conflict, have in the main survived their failures and persisted in living. Group selection, the main condition of evolution of the social disposition, has, therefore, been abolished; and of the various forms of social selection operating within societies, the chief of which we have briefly noticed, no one seems to have been of a nature to produce further evolution of the social disposition; all of them must rather have operated adversely to it. Military selection, selection by the Church’s rule of celibacy, political selection—all these must have fallen most heavily on the individuals in whom the social disposition was strong, whose conduct was influenced largely by the sense of duty, and less by the individual impulses and desires. We may conclude, then, with some confidence that there has not been further evolution of the innate moral disposition in the historic period. This conclusion is greatly at variance with popular conceptions; we are apt to pride ourselves upon our superior morality; to point to our humanitarian laws and institutions, to our tenderness for the weak, the poor, and the suffering; to our regard even for the welfare of savage peoples, whom we no longer deliberately exterminate, and for domestic animals; and to suppose that all this shows modern civilised men to be innately superior in morality to their ancestors and to the barbarous peoples. But our conclusion that the difference implies merely an evolution of moral tradition, not of moral nature, will appear probable if we reflect upon the fact that a widespread change of this kind in respect to some department of conduct has sometimes been produced within a very short space of time, even within the lifetime of one generation. Take the attitude of Englishmen towards slavery and the African slave trade. It is hardly more than half a century since large numbers of Englishmen, or men of English origin, owned great gangs of slaves or drew their wealth from slave labour; yet now most of us look with horror upon slavery of every kind. Take the case of kindness to domestic animals. It is a comparatively recent tradition; and, within the memories of those who are not yet middle-aged, a great improvement has taken place. Again, there are many persons who, while tender to