human beings: to prove that they secure to animals a better
protection from their enemies, very often facilities for getting
food and (winter provisions, migrations, etc.), longevity,
therefore a greater facility for the development of intellectual
faculties; and that they have given to men, in addition to the
same advantages, the possibility of working out those
institutions which have enabled mankind to survive in its hard
struggle against Nature, and to progress, notwithstanding all the
vicissitudes of its history. It is a book on the law of Mutual
Aid, viewed at as one of the chief factors of evolution--not on
all factors of evolution and their respective values; and this
first book had to be written, before the latter could become
possible.

I should certainly be the last to underrate the part which
the self-assertion of the individual has played in the evolution
of mankind. However, this subject requires, I believe, a much
deeper treatment than the one it has hitherto received. In the
history of mankind, individual self-assertion has often been, and
continually is, something quite different from, and far larger
and deeper than, the petty, unintelligent narrow-mindedness,
which, with a large class of writers, goes for "individualism"
and "self-assertion." N or have history-making individuals been
limited to those whom historians have represented as heroes. My
intention, consequently, is, if circumstances permit it, to
discuss separately the part taken by the self-assertion of the
individual in the progressive evolution of mankind. I can only
make in this place the following general remark:--When the
Mutual Aid institutions--the tribe, the village community, the
guilds, the medieval city--began, in the course of history, to