other side, in attempting to trace the instincts of justice, and a beneficent natural law, in the original common proprietorship of the tribe and the village group of kinsmen. It involved the exclusion of men of different blood, and of women even of the same blood; it was closely connected with slavery; and Sir H. Maine is obviously justified in objecting to descriptions which represent the communism of the primitive cultivating groups as an anticipation of modern democratic theories. Nor is the statement groundless, that the transformation and occasional destruction of the village communities was caused, over much of the world, by the successful assault of a democracy on an aristocracy.' This description, however, is not applicable to either England or Ireland. In both the assault was made by an aristocracy or a plutocracy; and in both the economic results to the cultivators of the soil were disastrous.

Works of genius and learning not only convey new information to other minds, but also stir them to reflection and further investigation, sometimes resulting in difference of conclusion. And especially where the subject is one, like the laws and legal history of Ireland, bristling with points respecting which much is necessarily open to conjecture and doubt, one of the uses of a work such as Sir H. Maine's is to excite controversy. But it establishes many important conclusions incontrovertibly, and does so not only with respect to its special subject, the early history of institutions, but also in respect of several social problems of our own day. One of these is the great question of race, and the causes of diversities of nationa character and career. Edmund Spenser, and Bishop Berkeley after him, saw in the manners and customs of the Irish, and the state of Irish society, the traits of a race naturally repugnant to civilization. Sir H. Maine teaches us to regard them as the characteristics of an early phase of social progress, presenting manifest germs of and proofs of capacity for improvement. Sir John Davis denounced Irish institutions as lewd and unreasonable;' Sir H. Maine shows that they belong to a stage of development through which the laws of all civilized nations have passed. It is needless to say how the lessons which Sir H. Maine deduces from the history of law tend to diminish

national prejudices, to improve international relations, and to facilitate the government of different nations and races under the same empire, or how hopeful they are in respect of the aptitudes of all races for civilization under propitious conditions. His investigations have likewise the merit, seldom possessed by the researches of scholars, of taking both sexes into account; and of showing that the same process of social development which displays itself in the transformation of archaic into civilized institutions, tends to raise the legal condition of women to the same level with that of men, leaving individual position to individual powers.

The method of investigation, it ought to be added, which Sir H. Maine has done more than any other writer to introduce into England, is applicable to other departments of social philosophy besides jurisprudence; and it is not a rash prediction that one of the results of his works on the history of law will be the application of the historical method to political economy. )

UNIVERSITY

CALIFORNIA

XXX.

HEARN'S ARYAN HOUSEHOLD.

(Athenæum, January 25, 1879.)

THE opening sentences of the introduction to Mr. Hearn's learned and interesting work remind one of the beginning of Macaulay's History of England, and it may be regarded as an indication of the progress of research into the structure of archaic society that so good a scholar as Mr. Hearn feels the ground firm enough under his foot to tread with the confident step of a narrative historian. He does not, it should be understood, profess to investigate the primitive condition of human beings, or broach any theory respecting it. His inquiries relate to the institutions and social life of the so-called Aryan branch of the human race at a stage at which the family, or, as. he prefers to call it, the household, and the clan, together with an intermediate group which he calls the near kin, mæg, or joint family, were constituted. He pronounces no opinion on theories such as M'Lennan's or Mr. Lewis Morgan's respecting a communistic state anterior to the institution of marriage, though his own view of the relation between the clan and the family would hardly be accepted by those authors. Archaic society means in Mr. Hearn's book, as it does in Sir Henry Maine's Ancient Law, patriarchal society, composed of families akin to each other, and each held together by the patria potestas, with a chief at the head of the whole community or clan, who represents the common ancestor, and is assumed to

The Aryan Household: an Introduction to Comparative Jurisprudence By William Edward Hearn, LL.D. Longmans & Co.

be his nearest descendant in the male line. It is, too, society at the settled and agricultural stage, at which the arts of building substantial houses and ploughing are practised. Mr. Hearn's clan is, in fact, the village community which Sir Henry Maine's researches have made known, in its original purity. Yet there is a difference, although not so wide or so deep as Mr. Hearn himself seems to suppose, between his view and Sir Henry Maine's. Their theories bring out different aspects of the same structure, and at first sight may seem built on different foundations, as Mr. Hearn represents them to be. Among the Aryan nations the basis of human association was, in his view, religion. The members of the community were kinsmen, but kinship, according to him, consisted not in common descent but in community of worship. Those who worshipped the same gods were kinsmen, although no common blood flowed in their veins, and those who did not were not of kin, although according to the flesh they may have been brother and brother and parent and child. But when we ask what the religion of these fellow-worshippers was, Mr. Hearn answers, the worship of forefathers. Archaic religion was, he says, domestic, and consisted of two closely related parts-the worship of deceased ancestors and the worship of the hearth, the latter being subsidiary to and consequent on the former, for the deceased forefather was buried, or assumed to be buried, under the hearth; though some superstition relating to fire probably entered into the rites. The spirit of the house father hovered round the place he loved in life, and, with powers for good and evil preternaturally exalted, still exercised unseen the functions which in his life he had performed.'

It follows that the root of the religion was reverence for forefathers, that the common worship was the effect of common descent, and that the fundamental bond of association, alike in the case of the family and the clan-for the clan, too, worshipped a common ancestor-was actual kinship. A time came, indeed, when the family no longer counted some who were related to it in blood, and reckoned among its members some who were not, but the exclusion of emancipated and the admission of adopted sons were certainly later develop

ments which, by a natural consequence, excluded the former from and admitted the latter to the worship of the ancestral gods. Ruth clave to her mother-in-law, and therefore to her people and gods, forsaking, consequently, her own people and gods. Thy people shall be my people, and thy gods my gods.'

6

Mr. Hearn brings out with skill and effect the potent influence of this form of religion on social life and sentimenton the authority of the house father, the solemnity of the common meals at which he was spiritually a partaker, the sacredness of the common property, the importance of an heir to preserve the memory of the dead and their place and offerings among the living, and the strength therefore of the tie of kinship by adoption as well as by blood. He looks, in short, at archaic society on its religious side, shows what its religion was, how powerful an agent it was, how it helped to bind the property of the family to the male line, because otherwise the ancestral spirits would lose their home, their altar, and their sacrifices, and how these spirits became in imagination the guardians of the house and its precincts, and a terror to marauders. He follows here a line of inquiry of great interest and instructiveness, from which light may hereafter be thrown on modern ideas and usages that are supposed to have a very different origin. It is, too, a line of inquiry which Sir Henry Maine, whose subject was archaic law, not archaic religion, has but lightly and occasionally touched. None the less is this archaic religion a branch from the stem of the patriarchal family, not the root of that grand factor of human society. The religion, too, which Mr. Hearn describes is manifestly not a primitive product of the human mind, but the growth of time and of family traditions and feelings. There is, indeed, reason to suspect that it had succeeded earlier superstitious ideas, and that the ancestral gods who in later times were expelled as false idols had themselves dethroned objects of a more primitive worship.

An author naturally inclines to attach chief importance to the side of a subject that has engaged his own chief attention, and to which he has contributed most, but when Mr. Hearn