CHAPTER XVI.

SOCIETY.

Social Stages, 401-Family, 402-Morals of Lower Races, 405-Public Opinion and Custom, 408-Moral Progress, 410-Vengeance and Justice, 414-War, 418-Property, 419-Legal Ceremonies, 423— Family Power and Responsibility, 426-Patriarchal and Military Chiefs, 428-Nations, 432-Social Ranks, 434-Government, 436.

In the reports of crimes which appear daily in the newspapers of our civilized land, such phrases often occur as savage fury, barbarous cruelty. These two words have come to mean in common talk such behaviour as is most wild, rough, and cruel. Now no doubt the life of the less civilized people of the world, the savages and barbarians, is more wild, rough, and cruel than ours is on the whole, but the difference between us and them does not lie altogether in this. As the foregoing chapters have proved, savage and barbarous tribes often more or less fairly represent stages of culture through which our own ancestors passed long ago, and their customs and laws often explain to us, in ways we should otherwise have hardly guessed, the sense and reason of our own. It should be understood that it is out of the question to give here even a summary of the complicated systems of society: all that can be done is to put before the

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reader some of its leading principles in ancient and modern life.

Mankind can never have lived as a mere struggling crowd, each for himself. Society is always made up of families or households bound together by kindly ties, controlled by rules of marriage and the duties of parent and child. Yet the forms of these rules and duties have been very various. Marriages may be shifting and temporary pairing, or unions where the husband may have several wives, and the wife several husbands. It is often hard to understand the family group and its ties in the rude and ancient world. Thus it seems to us a matter of course to reckon family descent in the male line, and this is now put in the clearest way by the son taking the father's surname. But in lower stages of civilization, on both sides of the globe, many tribes take the contrary idea as a matter of course. In most Australian tribes the children belong to the mother's clan, not the father's; so that in native wars father and son constantly meet as natural enemies. Chiefship often goes down in the royal mother's line, as among the Natchez, who had their sun-temples in what is now Louisiana. Yet this widespread law of female descent, deep as it lies in the history of society, had been so lost sight of among the ancient civilized nations, that when Herodotus noticed it among the Lykians, who took their names from their mothers and traced their pedigrees through the female branches only, the historian fancied this was a peculiar custom, in which they were unlike all other people. In the savage and barbaric world there prevails widely the rule called by McLennan exogamy or marrying-out, which forbids a man to take a wife of his own clan-an act which is considered criminal, and may even be punished with death. It is a strange contrast to the popular idea that savage life has no

rules, when we find Australian tribes where every man is bound to marry into the particular clan which is, so to speak, the wife-clan to his own. Among the Iroquois of North America the children took the clan-name or totem of the mother; so if she were of the Bear clan, her son would be a Bear, and accordingly he might not marry a Bear girl, but might take a Deer or Heron. Such laws appear also among higher nations who reckon descent in the male line. Thus in India a Brahman is not to marry a wife whose clan-name (her "cow-stall," as they say) is the same as his ; nor may a Chinese take a wife of his own surname. Though the family and tribe rules of the savage and barbaric world are too intricate to be fully discussed here, there are some instructive points to which attention should be called. Marriage is in early stages of society a civil contract. Thus, among the wild hunting-tribes of Nicaragua, the lad who wishes a girl for a wife kills a deer and lays it with a heap of firewood at the door of her parents' hut, which symbolic act is his offer to hunt and do man's work; if the gift is accepted, it is a marriage, without further ceremony. Among peoples of higher culture more formal promises and ceremonies come in, with feasts and gatherings of kinsfolk; and then, as in other important matters of life, the priest is called in to give divine blessing and sanction to the union. Where this is done, a wedding has come to be very different from what it was in the rough times of marriage by capture, such as might be seen in our own day among fierce forest tribes in Brazil, where the warriors would make forays on distant villages and by main force bring home wives. Ancient tradition knows this practice well, as where the men of Benjamin carry off the daughters of Shiloh dancing at the feast, and in the famous Roman tale of the rape of the Sabines, a legend putting in historical form the wife-capture

which in Roman custom remained as a ceremony. What most clearly shows what a recognised old-world custom it was, is its being thus kept up as a formality where milder manners really prevail. It had passed into this state among the Spartans, when Plutarch says that though the marriage was really by friendly settlement between the families, the bridegroom's friends went through the pretence of carrying off the bride by violence. Within a few generations the same old habit was kept up in Wales, where the bridegroom and his friends, mounted and armed as for war, carried off the bride; and in Ireland they used even to hurl spears at the bride's people, though at such a distance that no one was hurt, except now and then by accident, as happened when one Lord Hoath lost an eye, which mischance seems to have put an end to this curious relic of antiquity. It was one of the consequences of increase of property in the world, that the practice of buying wives came in, as where a Zulu bargains with a girl's people to let him have her perhaps for five oxen or ten. This was the custom in England among our barbaric forefathers, as appears in the West-Saxon law of Ine-"If a man buy a wife," &c. Cnut somewhat later forbade the wife to be sold, but the husband might give something of his own will. It is an interesting problem in the history of law how the money once paid as the bride's price passed into a gift or dower for her; some provision of this kind became necessary when the widow was no longer provided for by being taken, as she would have been in a ruder state of society, as a wife by her husband's brother.

Marriage has been here spoken of first, because upon it depends the family, on which the whole framework of society is founded. What has been said of the ruder kinds of family

union among savages and barbarians shows that there cannot be expected from them the excellence of those well-ordered households to which civilized society owes so much of its goodness and prosperity. Yet even among the rudest clans of men, unless depraved by vice or misery and falling to pieces, a standard of family morals is known and lived by. Their habits, judged by our notions, are hard and coarse, yet the family tie of sympathy and common interest is already formed, and the foundations of moral duty already laid, in the mother's patient tenderness, the father's desperate valour in defence of home, their daily care for the little ones, the affection of brothers and sisters, and the mutual forbearance, helpfulness, and trust of all. From the family this extends to a wider circle. The natural way in which a tribe is formed is from a family or group, which in time increases and divides into many households, still recognising one another as kindred, and this kinship is so thoroughly felt to be the tie of the whole tribe, that, even when there has been a mixture of `tribes, a common ancestor is often invented to make an imaginary bond of union. Thus kindred and kindness go together-two words whose common derivation expresses in the happiest way one of the main principles of social life.

Among the lessons to be learnt from the life of rude tribes is, how society can go on without the policeman to keep order. It is plain that even the lowest men cannot live quite by what the Germans call "faustrecht," or "fist-right," and we call "club-law." The strong savage does not rush into his weaker neighbour's hut and take possession, driving the owner out into the forest with a stone-headed javelin sent flying after him. Without some control beyond the mere right of the stronger, the tribe would break up in a week, whereas in fact savage tribes last on for ages. Under