§ 5. I have placed Neighbourhood along with Kindred among the relations out of which a certain claim for mutual services is thought to spring. However, no one perhaps would say that mere local juxtaposition is in itself a ground of duties: it seems rather that neighbours naturally feel more sympathy with one another than with strangers, as the tie of common humanity is strengthened even by such conjunction and mutual association as mere neighbourhood (without co-operation or friendship) may involve, and a man in whom this effect is not produced is thought more or less inhuman. And so in large towns where this mutual sympathy does not so naturally grow up (for all the townsmen are in a sense neighbours, and one cannot easily sympathise with each individual in a multitude), the tie of neighbourhood is felt to be relaxed, and neighbour only claims from neighbour, as the nearest man, what one man may claim from another. For there are some services, slight in ordinary times but greater in the case of exceptional need, which any man is thought to have a right to ask from any other: so that a comparatively trifling circumstance may easily give a special direction to this general claim, and make it seem reasonable that the service should be asked from one person rather than another. Thus any degree of kinship seems to have this effect (since the representation of this tends to produce a feeling of union and consequent sympathy), and so even the fact of belonging to the same province, as creating a slight probability of community of origin; and again similarities of various kinds, as one sympathises more easily with one’s like, and so persons naturally seek aid in distress from those of the same age, or sex, or rank, or profession. The duty of neighbourhood seems therefore only a particular application of the duty of general benevolence or humanity. And the claim of fellow-countrymen is of the same kind: that is, if they are taken as individuals; for one’s relation to one’s country as a whole is thought to be of a different kind, and to involve much more stringent obligations.