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.
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. Even now there is perhaps a 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, however, 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
difficulty, 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 collected
from the early chapters in Genesis, I need not attempt to depict with
any minuteness, both because they are familiar to most of us from our
earliest childhood, and because, from the interest once attaching to
the controversy which takes its name from the debate between Locke and
Filmer, 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 himself. The flocks and herds of
the children are the flocks and herds of the father, and the
possessions 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:--
"'_Toîsin d' out' agorai boulêphóroi oute thémistes,
themisteúei dè hékastos
paídôn ed alóchôn, out' allélôn alégousin._'"
'"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."' 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 aesthetic 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 mediaeval dialects. On the contrary, you find it
beginning--as new scientific discoveries and inventions now begin--here
a little and there a little, the same thing half-done in various
half-ways, and so as no one who knew the best way would ever have
begun. An idea used to prevail that bows and arrows were the 'primitive
weapons'--the weapons of universal savages; but modern science has made
a table,[3] and some savages have them and some have not, and some have
substitutes of one sort and some have substitutes of another--several
of these substitutes being like the 'boomerang,' so much more difficult
to hit on or to use than the bow, as well as so much less effectual.
And not only may the miscellaneous races of the world be justly
described as being upon various edges of industrial civilisation,
approaching it by various sides, and falling short of it in various
particulars, but the moment they see the real thing they know how to
use it as well, or better, than civilised man. The South American uses
the horse which the European brought better than the European. Many
races use the rifle--the especial and very complicated weapon of
civilised man--better, upon an average, than he can use it. The savage
with simple tools--tools he appreciates--is like a child, quick to
learn, not like an old man, who has once forgotten and who cannot
acquire again. Again, if there had been an excellent aboriginal
civilisation in Australia and America, where, botanists and zoologists,
ask, are its vestiges? If these savages did care to cultivate wheat,
where is the wild wheat gone which their abandoned culture must have
left? if they did give up using good domestic animals, what has become
of the wild ones which would, according to all natural laws, have
sprung up out of them? This much is certain, that the domestic animals
of Europe have, since what may be called the discovery of the WORLD
during the last hundred years, run up and down it. The English rat--not
the pleasantest of our domestic creatures--has gone everywhere; to
Australia, to New Zealand, to America: nothing but a complicated
rat-miracle could ever root him out. Nor could a common force expel the
horse from South America since the Spaniards took him thither; if we
did not know the contrary we should suppose him a principal aboriginal
animal. Where then, so to say, are the rats and horses of the primitive
civilisation? Not only can we not find them, but zoological science
tells us that they never existed, for the 'feebly pronounced,' the
ineffectual, marsupials of Australia and New Zealand could never have
survived a competition with better creatures, such as that by which
they are now perishing. We catch then a first glimpse of patriarchal
man, not with any industrial relics of a primitive civilisation, but
with some gradually learnt knowledge of the simpler arts, with some
tamed animals and some little knowledge of the course of nature as far
as it tells upon the seasons and affects the condition of simple
tribes. This is what, according to ethnology, we should expect the
first historic man to be, and this is what we in fact find him. But
what was his mind; how are we to describe that?
[3] See the very careful table and admirable discussion in Sir John
Lubbock's Pre-Historic Times.
I believe the general description in which Sir John Lubbock sums up his
estimate of the savage mind suits the patriarchal mind. 'Savages,' he
says, 'unite the character of childhood with the passions and strength
of men.' And if we open the first record of the pagan world--the poems
of Homer--how much do we find that suits this description better than
any other. Civilisation has indeed already gone forward ages beyond the
time at which any such description is complete. Man, in Homer, is as
good at oratory, Mr. Gladstone seems to say, as he has ever been, and,
much as that means, other and better things might be added to it. But
after all, how much of the 'splendid savage' there is in Achilles, and
how much of the 'spoiled child sulking in his tent.' Impressibility and
excitability are the main characteristics of the oldest Greek history,
and if we turn to the east, the 'simple and violent' world, as Mr.
Kinglake calls it, of the first times meets us every moment.
And this is precisely what we should expect. An 'inherited drill,'
science says, 'makes modern nations what they are; their born structure
bears the trace of the laws of their fathers;' but the ancient nations
came into no such inheritance; they were the descendants of people who
did what was right in their own eyes; they were born to no tutored
habits, no preservative bonds, and therefore they were at the mercy of
every impulse and blown by every passion.
The condition of the primitive man, if we conceive of him rightly, is,
in several respects, different from any we know. We unconsciously
assume around us the existence of a great miscellaneous social machine
working to our hands, and not only supplying our wants, but even
telling and deciding when those wants shall come. No one can now
without difficulty conceive how people got on before there were clocks
and watches; as Sir G. Lewis said, 'it takes a vigorous effort of the
imagination' to realise a period when it was a serious difficulty to
know the hour of day. And much more is it difficult to fancy the
unstable minds of such men as neither knew nature, which is the
clock-work of material civilisation, nor possessed a polity, which is a
kind of clock-work to moral civilisation. They never could have known
what to expect; the whole habit of steady but varied anticipation,
which makes our minds what they are, must have been wholly foreign to
theirs.
Again, I at least cannot call up to myself the loose conceptions (as
they must have been) of morals which then existed. If we set aside all
the element derived from law and polity which runs through our current
moral notions, I hardly know what we shall have left. The residuum was
somehow, and in some vague way, intelligible to the ante-political man,
but it must have been uncertain, wavering, and unfit to be depended
upon. In the best cases it existed much as the vague feeling of beauty
now exists in minds sensitive but untaught; a still small voice of
uncertain meaning; an unknown something modifying everything else, and
higher than anything else, yet in form so indistinct that when you
looked for it, it was gone--or if this be thought the delicate fiction
of a later fancy, then morality was at least to be found in the wild
spasms of 'wild justice,' half punishment, half outrage,--but anyhow,
being unfixed by steady law, it was intermittent, vague, and hard for
us to imagine. Everybody who has studied mathematics knows how many
shadowy difficulties he seemed to have before he understood the
problem, and how impossible it was when once the demonstration had
flashed upon him, ever to comprehend those indistinct difficulties
again, or to call up the mental confusion, that admitted them. So in
these days, when we cannot by any effort drive out of our minds the
notion of law, we cannot imagine the mind of one who had never known
it, and who could not by any effort have conceived it.
Again, the primitive man could not have imagined what we mean by a
nation. We on the other hand cannot imagine those to whom it is a
difficulty; 'we know what it is when you do not ask us,' but we cannot
very quickly explain or define it. But so much as this is plain, a
nation means a LIKE body of men, because of that likeness capable of
acting together, and because of that likeness inclined to obey similar
rules; and even this Homer's Cyclops--used only to sparse human
beings--could not have conceived.
To sum up--LAW--rigid, definite, concise law--is the primary want of
early mankind; that which they need above anything else, that which is
requisite before they can gain anything else. But it is their greatest
difficulty, as well as their first requisite; the thing most out of
their reach, as well as that most beneficial to them if they reach it.
In later ages many races have gained much of this discipline quickly,
though painfully; a loose set of scattered clans has been often and
often forced to substantial settlement by a rigid conqueror; the Romans
did half the work for above half Europe. But where could the first ages
find Romans or a conqueror? Men conquer by the power of government, and
it was exactly government which then was not. The first ascent of
civilisation was at a steep gradient, though when now we look down upon
it, it seems almost nothing.