main-springs of progress, and moral causes secondary, and, in comparison, not to be thought of. On the contrary, moral causes are the first here. It is the action of the will that causes the unconscious habit; it is the continual effort of the beginning that creates the hoarded energy of the end; it is the silent toil of the first generation that becomes the transmitted aptitude of the next. Here physical causes do not create the moral, but moral create the physical; here the beginning is by the higher energy, the conservation and propagation only by the lower. But we thus perceive how a science of history is possible, as Mr. Buckle said,—a science to teach the laws of tendencies-created by the mind, and transmitted by the body-which act upon and incline the will of man from age to age.

II.

BUT how do these principles change the philosophy of our politics? I think in many ways; and first, in one particularly. Political economy is the most systematised and most accurate part of political philosophy; and yet, by the help of what has been laid down, I think we may travel back to a sort of 'pre-economic age,' when the very assumptions of political economy did not exist, when its precepts would have been

ruinous, and when the very contrary precepts were requisite and wise.

6

For this purpose I do not need to deal with the dim ages which ethnology just reveals to us-with the stone age, and the flint implements, and the refuse-heaps. The time to which I would go back is only that just before the dawn of history-coeval with the dawn, perhaps, it would be right to say-for the first historians saw such a state of society, though they saw other and more advanced states too: a period of which we have distinct descriptions from eye-witnesses, and of which the traces and consequences abound in the oldest law. The effect,' says Sir Henry Maine, the greatest of our living jurists-the only one, perhaps, whose writings are in keeping with our best philosophy-' of the evidence derived from comparative jurisprudence is to establish that view of the primeval condition of the human race which is known as the Patriarchal Theory. There is no doubt, of course, that this theory was originally based on the Scriptural history of the Hebrew patriarchs in Lower Asia; but, as has been explained already, its connection with Scripture rather militated than otherwise against its reception as a complete theory, since the majority of the inquirers who till recently addressed themselves with most earnestness to the colligation of social phenomena, were either influenced by the strongest prejudice against Hebrew antiquities or by the strongest desire to construct their system without the assistance

of religious records.
disposition to undervalue these accounts, or rather to
decline generalising from them, as forming part of the
traditions of a Semitic people. It is to be noted, how-
ever, that the legal testimony comes nearly exclusively
from the institutions of societies belonging to the Indo-
European stock, the Romans, Hindoos, and Sclavonians
supplying the greater part of it; and indeed the diffi-
culty, at the present stage of the inquiry, is to know
where to stop, to say of what races of men it is not
allowable to lay down that the society in which they
are united was originally organised on the patriarchal
model. The chief lineaments of such a society, as col-
lected from the early chapters in Genesis, I need not
attempt to depict with any miruteness, both because
they are familiar to most of us from our earliest child-
hood, and because, from the interest once attaching to
the controversy which takes its name from the debate
between Locke and Filiner, they fill a whole chapter,
though not a very profitable one, in English literature.
The points which lie on the surface of the history are
these:―The eldest male parent-the eldest ascendant--
is absolutely supreme in his household. His dominion
extends to life and death, and is as unqualified over his
children and their houses as over his slaves; indeed the
relations of sonship and serfdom appear to differ in little
beyond the higher capacity which the child in blood
possesses of becoming one day the head of a family

Even now there is perhaps a

Vain

himself. The flocks and herds of the children are the flocks and herds of the father, and the possess..ons of the parent, which he holds in a representative rather than in a proprietary character, are equally divided at his death among his descendants in the first degree, the eldest son sometimes receiving a double share under the name of birthright, but more generally endowed with no hereditary advantage beyond an honorary precedence. A less obvious inference from the Scriptural accounts is that they seem to plant us on the traces of the breach which is first effected in the empire of the parent. The families of Jacob and Esau separate and form two nations; but the families of Jacob's children hold together and become a people. This looks like the immature germ of a state or commonwealth, and of an order of rights superior to the claims of family relation. "If I were attempting for the more special purposes of the jurist to express compendiously the characteristics of the situation in which mankind disclose themselves at the dawn of their history, I should be satisfied to quote a few verses from the "Odyssee " of Homer :

παίδων ἠδ ̓ ἀλόχων, οὔτ ̓ ἀλλήλων ἀλέγουσιν.” ”

"They have neither assemblies for consultation nor themistes, but everyone exercises jurisdiction over his wives and his children, and they pay no regard to one another.",

C.

じこの

THE PRELIMINARY AGE.

15

And this description of the beginnings of history is, confirmed by what may be called the last lesson of prehistoric ethnology. Perhaps it is the most valuable, as it is clearly the most sure result of that science, that it has dispelled the dreams of other days as to a primitive high civilisation. History catches man as he emerges from the patriarchal state: ethnology shows how he lived, grew, and improved in that state. The conclusive arguments against the imagined original civilisation are indeed plain to everyone. Nothing is more intelligible than a moral deterioration of mankind-nothing than an æsthetic degradation—nothing than a political degradation. But you cannot imagine mankind giving up the plain utensils of personal comfort, if they once knew them; still less can you imagine them giving up good weapons-say bows and arrows-if they once knew them. Yet if there were a primitive civilisation these things must have been forgotten, for tribes can be found in every degree of ignorance, and every grade of knowledge as to pottery, as to the metals, as to the means of comfort, as to the instruments of war. And what is more, these savages have not failed from stupidity; they are, in various degrees of originality, inventive about these matters. You cannot trace the roots of an old perfect system variously maimed and variously dying; you cannot find it, as you find the trace of the Latin language in the medieval dialects. On the contrary, you find it beginning-as new scientific discoveries