Plainly they do _not_. Man inherits the capacity for loyalty, but not the use to which he shall put it. The persons and causes (if any) to which he shall devote himself are suggested to him, often, indeed, imposed upon him, by education and environment. Nevertheless, they are his by choice, not by hereditary compulsion. And his choice may be bad. He may unselfishly devote himself to what is petty or vile, as he may to what is generous and noble. But on the possibility of error depends the possibility of progress; and if (to borrow a phrase from physics) our loyalty possessed as few “degrees of freedom” as that of ants or bees, our social organisation would be as rigid. The most careless glance at the pages of history, or the world of our own experience, will show how varied are the forms in which this capacity for loyalty is displayed. The Spartans at Thermopylæ, the “Blues” and the “Greens” at Byzantium, rival politicians in a hard-fought election, players and spectators at an Eton and Harrow Match, supply familiar illustrations of its variety and vigour. And do not suppose that in thus bringing together the sublime, the familiar, and the trivial, I am paradoxically associating matters essentially disparate. This is not so. I am not putting on a moral level the patriot and the partisan, the martyr to some great cause and the shouting spectator at a school match. What I am insisting on is that they all have loyalty in common; a loyalty which often is, and always may be, pure from egoistic alloy. Loyalties, then, which are characteristically human differ profoundly from those which are characteristically animal. The latter are due to instincts which include both the end to be sought for and the means by which it is to be attained. The former are rooted in a general capacity for, or inclination to, loyalty, with little inherited guidance either as to ends or means. Yet, if we accept selection as the source of the first, we can hardly reject it as the source of the second. For the survival value of loyalty is manifest. It lies at the root of all effective co-operation. Without it the family and tribe would be impossible; and without the family and the tribe, or some yet higher organisation, men, if they could exist at all, would be more helpless than cattle, weak against the alien forces of nature, at the mercy of human foes more capable of loyalty than themselves. A more powerful aid in the struggle for existence cannot easily be imagined.