tance of this subject is such as to call for a few
words of special elucidation.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Ancient Law.]

Thirty years ago, when Sir Henry Maine published that magnificent
treatise on Ancient Law, which, when considered in all its potency of
suggestiveness, has perhaps done more than any other single book of our
century toward placing the study of history upon a scientific basis, he
began by showing that in primitive society the individual is nothing and
the state nothing, while the family-group is everything, and that the
progress of civilization politically has consisted on the one hand in
the aggregation and building up of family-groups through intermediate
tribal organizations into states, and on the other hand in the
disentanglement of individuals from the family thraldom. In other words,
we began by having no political communities larger than clans, and no
bond of political union except blood relationship, and in this state of
things the individual, as to his rights and obligations, was submerged
in the clan. We at length come to have great nations like the English or
the French, in which blood-relationship as a bond of political union is
no longer indispensable or even much thought of, and in which the
individual citizen is the possessor of legal rights and subject to legal
obligations. No one in our time can forget how beautifully Sir Henry
Maine, with his profound knowledge of early Aryan law and custom, from
Ireland to Hindustan, delineated the slow growth of individual ownership
of property and individual responsibility for delict and crime out of an
earlier stage in which ownership and responsibility belonged only to
family-groups or clans.

[Sidenote: The patriarchal family not primitive.]

[Sidenote: "Mother-right."]

[Sidenote: Primitive marriage.]

[Sidenote: The system of reckoning kinship through females only.]

In all these brilliant studies Sir Henry Maine started with the
patriarchal family as we find it at the dawn of history among all
peoples of Aryan and Semitic speech,--the patriarchal family of the
ancient Roman and the ancient Jew, the family in which kinship is
reckoned through males, and in which all authority centres in the eldest
male, and descends to his eldest son. Maine treated this patriarchal
family as primitive; but his great book had hardly appeared when other
scholars, more familiar than he with races in savagery or in the lower