Page:Karl Kautsky - Ethics and The Materialist Conception of History - tr. J. B. Askew (1906).pdf/114

 social beasts of prey we find direct hostility to the members of other herds. Thus the pariah dogs of Constantinople in every street look very carefully out that no other dog comes into the district. It would be at once chased away, or even torn to pieces.

At a similar relation do the human herds arrive so soon as hunting and war rise in their midst. One of the most important forms of the struggle for existence is now for them the struggle of the herd against other herds of the same kind. The man who is not a member of the same society becomes a direct enemy. The social impulses not only do not hold good for him but directly oppose him. The stronger they are so much the better does the tribe hold together against the common foe, so much the more energetically do they fight the latter. The social virtues, mutual help, self-sacrifice, love of truth, etc., apply only to fellow-tribesmen, not to the members of another society. It excited much resentment against me when I stated these facts in the "Neue Zeit," and my statement was interpreted as if I had attempted to establish a special Social Democratic principle in opposition to the principles of the eternal moral law, which demands unconditional truthfulness to all men. In reality I have only stated that which has existed as the moral law within our breasts from the time when our forefathers became men, viz., that over against the enemy the social virtues are not required. There is no need, however, on that account that anybody should be especially indignant with the Social-Democracy, because there is no party which interprets the idea of society more widely than they, the party of Internationalism, which draws all nations, all races into the sphere of their solidarity. If the moral law applies only to members of our own society, the extent of the latter is still by no means fixed once for all. Rather does it increase in proportion to the degree in which the division of labour progresses; the productivity of human labour increases as do the means of human intercourse improve. The number of people increase whom a certain territory can support, who are bound to work in a