on the subject which he had promised to make. As to the South Slavonian communities, the actual origin of many of them has been recorded or is otherwise known. With the limitations mentioned in the text, they are composed of the descendants, through males, of a common male ancestor.

I have said above that workers in the new field of investigation opened by the life and usages of savage societies seem to me to be under some temptation to take mental operations for substantive realities. Mr. Morgan, it is well known, considered that the savage habit of grouping relatives in large classes, without reference to degree of grouping, for instance, a man's father and his uncles together and calling them all his fathers, or forming his brothers and male cousins in one class and calling them all his brothers-is a relic of a state of society in which the relations of the sexes were very unlike those to which we are accustomed. Earnest, and indeed bitter, controversies have already arisen on this theory of Classificatory Relationship, and ingenious efforts are from time to time made to identify and recover the lost forms of marriage. May I suggest that it is at least worthy of consideration whether all or part of the explanation may not lie in an imperfection of mental grasp on the part of savages? The reader of Dr. Macfarlane's remarkable 'Analysis of Relationships of Consanguinity and Affinity' ('Journal of Anthropological Institute,' xii. 1) will require no further proof that the comprehension of a large body of complex relationships demands a prodigious mental effort, even now requiring for its success the aid of a special notation. Some communities have surmounted a part of the difficulty by giving separate names to the nearer relationships, which is what Mr. Morgan calls the Descriptive System; but is there not ground

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for a suspicion that the savage classification is after all nothing more than a rude and incomplete attempt at the mental contemplation of a tolerably numerous tribal body? Is it more than a conception of complex relationship, reached by looking only at generations and by eliminating the idea of grade or degree? The rough view of a community as consisting of generations is common enough. It appears alike in the Hindu sacerdotal distribution of life into that of the Student, the Householder, and the Ascetic, and in the fine Greek song of the militant Dorians which makes the men boast that they are warriors, the children that they will be warriors some day, and the old men that they were warriors once.

CHAPTER IX.

THE DECAY OF FEUDAL PROPERTY IN FRANCE

AND ENGLAND.

CONSIDERING the immense space which the first French Revolution filled in the eyes of the generation which immediately succeeded it, it is surprising at first sight that the search after authentic materials for an opinion concerning its causes, course, and character was for a while but slackly prosecuted. A virtually inexhaustible store of such materials existed in the cahiers -the statements of grievances which, according to the ancient practice of the French States-General, were sent up from every administrative subdivision of France to the body which became the first Constituent Assembly. Yet it is only in comparatively recent days that this and other similar stores of historical wealth have been critically examined. The story runs (I do not know whether it has found its way into print) that a well-known German historian once expressed his amazement at having pointed out to him in Paris some dusty bundles of papers, with the remark that they had lain undisturbed since

they were deposited in the Archives on the reconstruction, after the close of the Reign of Terror, of the gloomily famous Committees of Public Salvation and General Security. 'But you have classical histories of the Revolution,' he said; have not these documents been examined by their writers?' 'No,' was the reply, 'that is the dust of 1794.'

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There is, however, some account to be given of this neglect, especially as regards the cahiers. One cause of it has undoubtedly been that preference for general explanations of phenomena which has always been a heavy drawback on French genius; and the general explanations of the first French Revolution current in France are a multitude. But another, and probably the most powerful, cause is the nearness of the Revolution itself. De Tocqueville, who first dug deep into the cahiers, and showed what great results might be obtained by thoroughly exploring that mine, has left the striking remark that no foreigner can properly appreciate the state of sentiment in one section of French society, where there is scarcely a single family in which the guillotining of a parent or a near relative is not a recollection or a fresh tradition; and one of the fruits of this condition of feeling is a strong reluctance to connect the France of the Revolution with the France of the Monarchy. Another, and a much larger, portion of the nation traces its political and social rights to the period

during which all this blood was shed; and hence arises a manifest disposition to regard the Revolution as a historical catastrophe, terrible but inevitable, and to look on the society which succeeded it as no more closely related to that which preceded it than is the vegetation which has grown on the sides of Vesuvius after an eruption to the vegetation which the lava destroyed. Between unwillingness to find the parentage of the Revolution in the old régime before it, and unwillingness to have its crimes placed in full light, the first condition of scientific history, the critical examination of its sources was too much and too long overlooked. But of late, and mainly owing to the influence of that invaluable work on the relations between Old and New France, on which De Tocqueville was still engaged at his death, the business of correcting preconceived opinions by the aid of authentic historical materials has been rapidly proceeding. Two interesting books, one by M. Chassin ('Le Génie de la Révolution '), and the other by M. Doniol ('La Révolution Française et la Féodalité'), are among the first-fruits of renewed examination of the cahiers; and in the three volumes of his 'Origins of Contemporary France,' which M. Taine has lately published, he has given us instalments of a work which, apart from its great literary merits, is not unworthy to be compared with De Tocqueville's fragment in the originality and