element into prominence if the most famous of all historical evidence is quoted-that of the Hebrew people. It is impossible in a single paper to produce the whole range of evidence on the subject, which would form matter for a volume. It is, therefore, necessary to quote the most familiar and also the most typical instances. Greece and Rome represent early Aryan development; Israel, the fullest Semitic development. The evidence from this source is most perfect. I shall summarize its features to correspond with those already pointed out in Greece and Rome; for though a much more comprehensive survey could be made it would be at the expense of conciseness and perspicuity.

Regarding it all from below upwards, says Ewald,* one of the greatest of Biblical critics, we see three well-marked stages in which the whole broad and firm edifice rises aloft. First comes the individual household, which maintained. itself very strongly in its original wide independence and power, and therefore embraced numerous human beings of a very diverse character. Several single households together form, in the second place, a clan. Several clans, in the third place, are united together into a tribe. As in Greece, the clan is the lowest political unit; for the Elders who formed the national council were not every one the father of an actual family. It is true that more than 400,000 men completely equipped were at times counted at a meeting of the assembly (Judges, xx., 2; xxi., 16; 1 Chron., xii., 23-28); but the actual deliberation took place in the midst of only the Elders, each of whom had previously to come to an understanding with his men. As in Greece, also, the interstices between the families composing the clans are plainly visible: for each individual household of the tribe had its definite portion of land, which was for ever to remain the unalienable heritage of this house.§

* Antiq. of Israel (Eng. Trans.) pp. 242, 243, and Notes. + Ibid, 245.

Ibid, 247.

§ Ibid, 177, and Note 1.

And we have a still further parallel in that, in cases of crime it was long customary to make the children, as well as the guilty party, expiate the offence; and that, along with the great central sanctuary, there existed a multitude of smaller ones,† which doubtless expressed the household religion, an example of which we have in the case of Laban's household gods. It is not difficult to understand from such evidence as this, that it is clearly perceivable when the domestic life first overstepped its narrowest limits, and one household, if only for the sake of external security, endeavoured to bind itself as closely as possible on to another, thus endeavouring to build a higher household, without its being possible to break down the internal partition walls between the individual families. To conclude the evidence of this period, I will quote the summary of Ewald as containing the very gist and key-note of its principal features. "From first to last," he says, "the law regards the individual only as a member of a household— the primary, and the closest, and also the most permanently enduring human community."

We are now in a position to state, that, from internal evidence, we can define a primitive state of society, which exhibits for its chief feature, that the highest agregate of human beings does not assume too great a numerical force to make the term family, roughly speaking, applicable to it or, in other words, the family represents to this age, what the nation does to modern times. We can, in short, claim for the patriarchal family all the qualifications necessary for it to possess an independent sovereignty and law and be itself independent. I shall presently show

that it may also be termed political.

The term patriarchal is unfortunate in having a cluster of associations surrounding it, wholly unwarranted from its

historical value. It would take too long a disquisition to clear this away, and it would only introduce another chapter into the absurd controversy between Locke and Filmer. But a general idea of the term is necessary. Its nucleus and origin was the natural family of a single pair: of course modifications, or rather developments, of this phase take place before it passes into Communal history, just as developments of Communal history take place before passing into National history. These modifications of a natural family are due chiefly to the extreme quarrelsomeness of the little groups, and then, as a consequence of this, to the rise of various customs of marriage differing from the most primitive of all, monogamy.

The warfare of this period answers to what Lord Bacon calls the highest trial of right, when states, that acknowledge no superior on earth, put themselves upon the justice of God for the deciding of their controversies. It was the highest trial of right among independent communities for power and leadership. Sir Henry Maine quotes Von Maurer as an authority for asserting that the great cause of one family gaining power over another, was the frequency of intertribal war ;* but Mr. Spencer puts this, perhaps, in a more general light. An important benefit, he says, bequeathed by war has been the formation of large societies. By force alone were small nomadic hordes welded into large tribes; by force alone were large tribes welded into nations; by force alone have small nations been welded into large nations. The God of war is looked upon as the God of justice, might rules as the equivalent, the incarnation, of right, so far as regards the relationship between the independent units, who have no common superior to be governed by, and who have not anything answering to the public opinion -the positive morality or International Law-of later and modern times. And this gradually varies the social notions * Village Communities, p. 142.

Study of Sociology, p. 195; also vide, page 193 and Prin. of Soc., i., 540.

within the independent units. Instead of the natural household of parents and offspring, we have something more than this-something more, though still retaining the original nucleus. The parent-chiefs captured other women for their wives, other people for their slaves. The first caused a more extensive natural offspring,* and a corresponding relaxation of the natural affection for children (Montesquieu xvi., 6), and opened the way for the adoption of stranger children as members of the family; the second caused a greater degree of despotism in the chiefs; and both, in the end, had the effect of considerably raising the numerical force of the primitive family groups. This numerical force had great means of increasing, besides the one which marks a later stage of social progress, the aggregation of independent tribes. A powerful family chief would always be the centre to which people of less power and consequence would attach themselves. These weaker strangers will be the more closely attached to the house, and the more a part of its possessions, the more independently each house exists for itself alone, and the more exclusive its dependence on the paternal authority. Professor Ewald traces out this idea with reference to the famous example of patriarchal chieftainship and its corresponding society indicated by the story of Abraham; and I place in a note the several stages of this submission to human authority, which that eminent author has detected in the Biblical narrative.t Again, there must have been some cohesion on the death of a parent

* Vide Ewald's Antiq. of Israel, pp. 207-8. Nothing is more alien to those days than prudish and melancholy views in regard to marriage and children. This shows itself most in the custom of marriage by the brother-in-law (the leviratus). I quote this as evidence of the desire to beget offspring, not, of course, in regard to the custom of polygamous marriages implied in the text.

I arrange Professor Ewald's notes on this subject under the following progressive heads:-1. Prisoners of war. 2. Human robbery. 3. Moral turpitude. 4. Debtors, when the individual houses were united in the higher organisation of aggregated communities; and after this important epoch follow, 5. Sale of children. 6. Homeborn children of slaves. It is with the first three that the text deals. Ewald's Antiq., p. 210 and Notes. See also a parallel

chief, the tribe did not at once split up and separate; and we have some clue to this in the expression of the Divine vengeance extending to the fifth generation and its parallel of human vengeance among the Bedouins.* It is easy

to conclude from this that it became the object and pride of the chiefs to possess a numerous following, even as in Europe princely splendour and greatness was measured among the Gallic tribes whom Cæsar conquered, not by extent of territory, but by the multitude of the population.† The term “family," then, as applied to this early period of man's history, has to be modified to take in the facts I have just enumerated, and to meet this modification the term "patriarchal family" is generally adopted. The key note to its existence is the evidence of primitive marriage customs; and though Mr. Morgan's gigantic work, published under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institute, undertakes to prove that the earliest form of marriage was unconditional promiscuity-if that may be termed marriage, for want of another word-and that marriage between single pairs originated just on the borderland of civilisation, yet I am inclined to believe that Mr. Spencer's arguments in favour of monogamy being the first form of marital relationship cannot be well disputed.‡ Around the nucleus thus formed clustered the subsequent influences just mentioned, and in this form we shall meet it on the broad surface. of universal history, a group of men and women, children and slaves, of animate and inanimate property, all con

case in Tacitus, Germ., 14, Si civitas, in qua orti sunt, longa pace et otio torpeat, &c.

* Ewald's Antiq., 168-9. According to Gen., i., 23, it would seem that five generations were the utmost that could be thought of as living together with the father of the race or his sons.

Hampson's Origines Patricia, p. 54. See Tacitus, Germ., 39, as to the number and greatness of the Semnones.

Prin. of Soc., i., p. 698-9, 704. Mr. Spencer does not mention the American authority alluded to in the text, though Mr. McLennan receives a whole chapter of criticism to himself.