m of
society, a man can leave it under certain circumstances with even
greater ease than he entered it. He can become as good as dead without
the necessity of making way with himself. Theoretically, he can cease to
live while still practically existing; for it is always open to the head
of a family to abdicate.

The word abdicate has to our ears a certain regal sound. We
instinctively associate the act with a king. Even the more democratic
expression resign suggests at once an office of public or quasi public
character. To talk of abdicating one's private relationships sounds
absurd; one might as well talk of electing his parents, it would seem to
us. Such misunderstanding of far-eastern social possibilities comes from
our having indulged in digressions from our more simple nomadic habits.
If in imagination we will return to our ancestral muttons and the then
existing order of things, the idea will not strike us as so strange; for
in those early bucolic days every father was a king. Family economics
were the only political questions in existence then. The clan was the
unit. Domestic disputes were state disturbances, and clan-claims the
only kind of international quarrels. The patriarch was both father to
his people and king.

As time widened the family circle it eventually reached a point where
cohesion ceased to be possible. The centrifugal tendency could no
longer be controlled by the centripetal force. It split up into separate
bodies, each of them a family by itself. In their turn these again
divided, and so the process went on. This principle has worked
universally, the only difference in its action among different races
being the greater or less degree of the evolving motion. With us the
social system has been turning more and more rapidly with time. In the
Far East its force, instead of increasing, would seem to have decreased,
enabling the nebula of its original condition to keep together as a
single mass, so that to-day a whole nation, resembling a nebula indeed
in homogeneity, is swayed by a single patriarchal principle. Here, on
the contrary, so rapid has the motion become that even brethren find
themselves scattered to the four winds.

An Occidental father and an Oriental head of a family are no longer
really correlative terms. The latter more closely resembles a king
in his duties, responsibilities, and functions generally. Now, in the
Middle Ages in Europe, when a king grew tired of affairs of state, he