But when a permanent home is fixed on some spot of earth, presumably with the beginnings of agriculture, a new condition begins to operate--the “indifference” of space. Perhaps we are surprised that “indifference” should be an ethical stimulus. But nothing is more instructive than to note how qualities of our surroundings, which by themselves seem negative or the barest natural necessities, spring into significance when taken up into the unity of life. Locality means a potential neighbourhood. It may be long before any one comes near you except your own cousinhood, your tribe or clan. But the indifference of space is a standing invitation, and it is pretty certain that some day strangers will become your neighbours, and that you will have to take up some mental attitude towards them. Historians and jurists have described to us the struggle between the principle of kinship and the principle of neighbourhood. When we read that a plebeian, in the eyes of a Roman patrician, simply could not make a real marriage any more than the beasts of the field, this is not, as it may have become by survival, intentional arrogance on the patrician’s part. It was rather the state of mind of Mrs. Transome towards Rufus Lyon, “sheer inability to consider him.” A proof of what a struggle it involved to reach a new attitude of mind as regarded the resident alien is given by {306} the half-way house at which it was found necessary to pause in the process. The recognition of kinship on the ground of residence was the fiction, we are told, by which the mind assisted itself to a positive attitude towards those whom the indifference of space insisted on bringing within its range. And the positive attitude towards which it was groping its way was of course the recognition of humanity, the equality of man in the truest sense which that ambiguous phrase will bear.