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 The influence of anthropology on the cou 
 
 3 1924 008 317 632 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
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 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924008317632 
 
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PUBLICATIONS 
 
 IN 
 
 HISTORY 
 
 Vol. 4 ISfo. 1 
 
 THE INFLUENCE OP ANTHROPOLOGY ON 
 THE COURSE OP POLITICAL 
 
 SCIENCE 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN LINTON MYRES 
 
 WyTceTiam Professor of Ancient History in the 
 University of Oxford 
 
 BERKELEY, 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS, 
 i 1916 
 
THE INFLUENCE OF ANTHROPOLOGY ON 
 THE COURSE OF POLITICAL 
 
 SCIENCE* 
 
 JOHN L. MYRES 
 
 Anthropology is the Science of Man. Its full task is nothing 
 less than this, to observe and record, to classify and interpret, 
 all the activities of all the varieties of this species of living 
 being. In the general scheme of knowledge, therefore, an- 
 thropology holds a double place, according to our own point of 
 view. From one standpoint it falls into the position of a de- 
 partment of zoology, or geography; of zoology, since man, con- 
 sidered as a natural species, forms only one small part of the 
 animal population of this planet; of geography, because his 
 reason, considered simply as one of the forces which change the 
 face of nature, has, as we shall see directly, a range which is 
 almost worldwide. From another point of view anthropology 
 itself, in the strictest sense of the word, is seen to embrace and 
 include whole sciences such as psychology, sociology, and the 
 rational study of art and literature; since each of these vast 
 departments of knowledge is concerned solely with a single 
 group of the manifold activities of man. In practice, however. 
 
 *Tliis essay was originally written as a Presidential Address to the 
 Anthropological Section of the British Association for the Advance- 
 ment of Science on the occasion of its meeting at Winnipeg in 1909. 
 The address was printed in the Proceedings of the Association at 
 that meeting (London, John Murray, 1910). The investigation is 
 resumed here with more extensive references, ampler quotations from 
 the older writers, and the addition of two sections, on Comparative 
 Philology, and on Polygenism. This re-writing has been the result 
 of my residence in Berkeley as Sather Professor of Classical Litera- 
 ture at the University of California during the months of January to 
 April, 1914. 
 
2 University of California Publications in History Vfou 4 
 
 a pardonable pride, no less than the weighty fact that man, alone 
 among the animals, truly possesses reason, has kept the study of 
 man a little aloof from the rest of zoology. Dogmatic scruples 
 have intervened to prevent man from ever ranking merely as one 
 of the "forces of nature," and have set a hard problem of de- 
 limitation between historians and geographex'S. And the par- 
 donable modesty of a very young science — for modem anthropol- 
 ogy is barely as old as chemistry — has restrained it from insist- 
 ing on encyclopedic claims in face of reverend institutions like 
 the sciences of the mind, of statecraft, and of taste. 
 
 Yet when I say that anthropology is a young science I mean 
 no more than this, that in the unfolding of that full bloom of 
 rational culture, which sprang from the seeds of the Renais- 
 sance, and of which we are the heirs and trustees, anthropology 
 found its place in the sunlight later than most ; and almost alone, 
 among the sciences can reckon any of its founders among the 
 living. This was of course partly an accident of birth and cir- 
 cumstance; for in the House of Wisdom there are many man- 
 sions; a Virchow, a Bastian, or a Tylor might easily have 
 strayed through the gate of knowledge into other fields of 
 work; just as Locke and Montesquieu only narrowly missed 
 the trail into anthropology. 
 
 But this late adolescence was also mainly the result of causes 
 which we can now see clearly. Man is, most nearly of all living 
 species, the "ubiquitous animal." Anthropology, like meteor- 
 'Ology, and like geography itself, gathers its data from all longi- 
 iiudes, and almost all latitudes, on this earth. It was necessary 
 therefore that the study of man should lag behind the rest of the 
 sciences, as long as any large masses of mankind remained with- 
 drawn from its view; and we have only to remember that Aus- 
 tralia and Africa were not even crossed at all — much less ex- 
 plored—by white men, till within living memory, to realize what 
 this limitation means. In addition to this, modern "Western 
 civilisation, when it did at last come into contact with aboriginal 
 peoples in new continents, too often came, like the religion which 
 it professed, bringing "not peace but a sword." The customs 
 
1916] Myres: Anthropology and Political Science 3 
 
 and institutions of alien people have been viewed too often, even 
 by reasonable and good men, simply as "y^ beastlie devices of y" 
 heathen," and the pioneers of our culture, perversely mindful 
 only of the narrower creed, that "he that is not with us is 
 against us," have set out to civilise savages by wrecking the 
 civilisation which they had. 
 
 I need not labour the point that it is precisely these two 
 causes, ignorance of many remoter peoples, and reckless destruc- 
 tion or disfigurement of some that are near at hand, which are 
 still the two great obstacles to the progress of our science. But 
 it is no use crying over spilt milk, and I turn rather to the posi- 
 tive and cheering thought that the progress of anthropology has 
 been rapid and sure, in close proportion to the spread of Euro- 
 pean intercourse with the natives of distant lands ; and that its 
 further advance is essentially linked with similar enterprises. 
 
 Anthropology and Politics in Ancient Greece 
 
 Instances of what I mean are scattered over the whole his- 
 tory of anthropology. Philosophy, as we all know, begins in 
 wonder; it is the surest way to jostle people out of an intel- 
 lectual groove into new lines of thought, if they can be con- 
 fronted personally and directly with some object of that numer- 
 ous class which seems uncouth only because it is unfamiliar. 
 The sudden expansion of the geographical horizon of the early 
 Greeks, in the seventh and sixth centuries, b. c, brought these 
 earliest and keenest of anthropologists face to face with peoples 
 who lived, for example, in a rainless country, or in trees, or 
 who ate monkeys, or grandfathers, or called themselves by their 
 mothers' names, or did other disconcerting things; and this set 
 them thinking, and comparing, and collecting more and more 
 data, from trader and traveller, for an answer to perennial 
 problems, alike of their anthropology and of ours. Can climate 
 alter character or change physique, and if so, how? Does the 
 mode of life or the diet of a people affect that people's real self, 
 or its value for us? Is the father, as the Greeks believed, or 
 
4 University of California Publications in History t^oL. 4 
 
 the mother who bore them, the natural owner and guardian of 
 children? Is the Heracles whom they worship in Thasos the 
 same god as he whose temple is in Tyre 1 Because the Colchians 
 wear linen, and practise circumcision, are they to be regarded 
 as colonists of the Egyptians? or can similar customs spring up 
 independently on the Nile and on the Phasis? Here, in fact, 
 are all the great problems of modern anthropology, flung out 
 for good and all, as soon as ever human reflective reason found 
 itself face to face with the facts of other human societies, even 
 within so limited a region as the old Mediterranean world. 
 
 And I would have you note that these old Greek problems, 
 like all the supreme problems of science old and new, were not 
 theoretical problems merely. Bach of them stood in direct rela- 
 tion to life. To take only cases such as I quoted just now from 
 the Father of History — is there, for example, among all the 
 various regions and aspects of the world, any real earthly para- 
 dise, any delectable country, where without let or hindrance the 
 good man may lead the good life? Is there an ideal diet, an 
 ideal social structure, or in general, an ideal way of life for 
 men ; or are all the good things of this world wholly relative to 
 the persons, the places, and the seasons where they occur ? I do 
 not mean that the ancient Greeks ever found out any of these 
 things, for all their searching; or even that all ancient seekers 
 after marvels and travellers' tales were engaged consciously 
 in anthropological research at all. I mean only this : that the 
 experiences, and the problems, and the practical end of it all, 
 were as certainly present to the minds of men like Herodotus 
 and Hippocrates, as they have been in all great scientific work 
 that the world had seen.'^ 
 
 In the same way it has for some while been clear to me that 
 neither Plato nor Aristotle, the great outstanding figures of 
 fourth-century Greece, was constructing theories of human 
 nature entirely in the air. Their conceptions both of the ideal 
 
 1 1 have dealt more fully with this aspect of fifth-century Greece 
 In a paper contributed to Anthropology and the Classics, Oxford, 1908. 
 
1916] Myres: Anthropology and Political Science 5 
 
 state of society, and of the elements which were fundamental 
 and essential in actual societies as they knew them, were deter- 
 mined to a very large extent by their observation of real men in 
 Sparta, Persia, or Scythia. But it is also clear that much that 
 had been familiar to the historians of the fifth century, and par- 
 ticularly to Herodotus, had fallen out of vogue with the philo- 
 sophers of the fourth. Systematic clearness had been attained 
 only by the sacrifice of historic accuracy. Thucydides, in fact, 
 standing right in the parting of the ways between history and 
 rhetoric, might fairly have extended his warnings to a dis- 
 sociation of history from political philisophy, which was just 
 as imminent. 
 
 The "Middle Ages" of Social Despair 
 
 From the modern evolutionary standpoint, as in the teleology 
 of Aristotle, the notion that the original state of anything has 
 any necessary connection with the perfect or ideal state of it, is 
 barely intelligible. Each of these philosophies, like the earlier 
 philosophy of Solon, "looks to the end," and interprets the 
 past and the present in the light of the future and in strict 
 relation to it. But this return to what in practical life would 
 be optimism, is of quite recent growth, and closely related to 
 the revival of Greek ways of thinking which characterizes our 
 time. Almost until living memory, doctrines of a perfect past, 
 and of human history as a series of lapses from past perfection 
 remained dominant no less in what passed for anthropology than 
 in history, theology, and thought at large. Sometimes it was 
 the Golden Age of the Greeks of Hesiod's time, a time of blood 
 and iron, of the wreckage of the older order, and chaotic gesta- 
 tion of a new; when belief (and practice too) was tinged, now 
 with sunset memories of "Golden Mycenae," now with the 
 twilight hope of a magnus annus — first fruit of astronomy 
 newborn — which should at length turn full circle and repeat 
 the perfection — and the decadence. Sometimes it was the 
 deciduous "Paradise" of the Semites, once gone and gone 
 forever, with no hope left at all in Babylonia, but that of 
 
6 University of California Publications in History [Vol. 4 
 
 a final end to the existing cycle of things; or at best, where 
 Egyptian ideas penetrated, of a day of final reckoning, 
 when Osiris — or another — should come. But whether Greek 
 of the Iron Age, or Semitic in origin, the belief was 
 belief in a decadence. It involved a conception of history 
 as a progress away from the ideal, in the direction of 7rapeKj8ao-ets, 
 perverted or distorted states, forming a series of progressive 
 degeneration. Plato, whose experience inculcated pessimism, 
 even while the eye of faith saw optimist, accepted from current 
 literature, and from tales of Egypt, Hesiodic decadence and the 
 notion of circularity ; and even Aristotle, in politics, never freed 
 himself from a popular impression at variance with his phil- 
 osophic scheme. 
 
 From quite another side of Semitic thought, not unaffected 
 by those Egyptian ideas of a restitution of all things "when 
 Osiris shall come," arises the Christian idea of what we may 
 call the "post-social state," when there shall be "neither marry- 
 ing nor giving in marriage" but a dissolution of all bonds of 
 civil society as we know it ; a state of things which is to be, on 
 the one hand, a complete realization of all that the natural order 
 (conceived still as a decadence) prohibited the individual from 
 attaining, and, on the other, almost the annihilation of individ- 
 uality by incorporation in the Being of God. The latter solu- 
 tion, of course, is neither Greek, nor Semitic, nor Egyptian, but 
 comes in from the tropical East, and mainly after Alexander's 
 time, though Plato had glimpses of it. And this idea of an evo- 
 lution into a state of Nature which is future, whether conceived 
 as proceeding ad infinitum, or as attaining a private consumma- 
 tion, has had profound influence from time to time, both on the 
 growth of political theory, and in the practical administration 
 of states. And besides this kinetic optimism, the static optimism 
 of Greek politicians, and of Aristotle, when he is most nearly 
 reflecting ra A€yo>eva — the Greek "man in the street" — faded 
 almost out of existence, except among the barns of the Eich Fool, 
 and in latterday Homes of Lost Causes. 
 
1916] Myres: Anthropology and Political Science 7 
 
 Anthropology and the BenaissoMce 
 
 At the Revival of Learning it was the same as in the great 
 days of Greece. New vistas of the world were being opened up 
 by the voyagers ; new types of men, of modes of life, of societies 
 and states, were discovered and described; new comparisons 
 were forced upon men by new knowledge crowding thick into 
 their minds ; and new questions, which were nevertheless old as 
 the hills, made eddies and rapids in the swift current of thought, 
 and cried out for an answer. Take the central political prob- 
 lems for example: What constitutes the right to govern, and 
 what is the origin of law ? In medieval Europe this was simple 
 enough. The duke, or the king, or the bishop governed by au- 
 thority of the emperor, or the pope; and pope and emperor 
 ruled (like Edward VII) "by the Grace of God." Yet here, 
 in Guinea, in Monomotapa, in Cathay, and in Peru, were great 
 absolute monarchies which knew nothing of the pope or the 
 emperor and were mighty hazy about God. Yet their subjects 
 obeyed them, and gave good reasons for their obedience, and 
 chief est of their reasons (as in all times and places) was this: 
 "We should be much worse off if we didn't." 
 
 Unsocial Man and the Pre-Social State 
 
 It would take me very far afield if I were to try to show how 
 this universal answer came to change its ground from politics to 
 anthropology, so that to the question — how men knew that they 
 would be much worse off if they didn't — the answer came, that 
 once upon a time they had been much worse off, because they 
 didn't. For my present purpose it is enough to note that, in 
 all ages, philosophers who set out to define the nature of the 
 State, have become involved in speculations about its origin; 
 that historians in their researches into its origin, have been 
 forced into conclusions as to its nature; and that in both eases 
 every belief about the nature of the State has been found to 
 involve a belief about a state of nature; an answer of some 
 kind, that is, to the question whether man was originally and 
 
8 University of California Pvilications in History [Voi.. 4 
 
 naturally a social animal, or whether at some early period of 
 his history he became social and domestic. In the latter event, 
 how was domestication effected, and what sort of thing was 
 undomestieated man? In the ancient world, after long contro- 
 versy, Aristotle's definition of man as the "social animal" had 
 carried the day, and ruled that question out of court. But at 
 the Eevival of Learning, the unnatural behaviour of certain 
 actual societies towards their individual members had revived 
 irresistibly the whole question whether society was part of the 
 natural order at all, and not a device of the heathen, a mis- 
 take or a pis aller; and whether, if society was not thus "nat- 
 ural," men would not really be better off if they returned to 
 their natural, pre-social, unsocial state, and began again at the 
 beginning, to work out their own salvation. This belief in a 
 pre-social state played a large part in the political philosophy 
 of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries ; and conversely it 
 was the very fact that the pre-social state as a philosophical 
 conception fell out of vogue at the beginning of the nineteenth, 
 which has distinguished modem political philosophy so markedly 
 from its predecessors. 
 
 I have made it clear, I hope, that our problem of the history 
 of the doctrine of a State of Nature and of its influence on 
 political thought is independent altogether of the question how 
 such a doctrine first came into existence. All that it can con- 
 cern us to presuppose is that there descended from the ancient 
 world to the modern a continuous popular tradition and fixed 
 idea, first, that there had "once upon a time" been a stage of 
 man's development in which all the conventions and restrictions 
 of actual society, as well as all its benefits, were uninvented 
 yet, and human animals — to put the whole matter in a nutshell 
 — expatiated on this planet undomestieated; secondly, that in 
 spite of social habits long acquired, it was still possible to 
 isolate, by philosophical analysis of society itself and of the 
 human mind, those traits, or some of them, which had character- 
 ized undomestieated man in those ancient days; thirdly, that 
 it was conceivable — such are the audacities of faith — that some 
 
1916] Myres: Anthropology and Political Science 9 
 
 of the mirahilia which ancient writers had preserved, from 
 Herodotus onward, about the inhabitants of the Extremities, 
 might turn out to have been survivals of pre-social man into 
 an age when most men had become wholly social ; and fourthly, 
 that, if so, there was still an off-chance that further research 
 might even now reveal examples of pre-social, or at least, ac- 
 tually «o?i-social man, under circumstances which might per- 
 mit him to be studied. But I have sufficiently indicated al- 
 ready, that the revival of political speculation which accom- 
 panied the Eevival of Learning, however closely it may have 
 been linked with the practical necessities of European politics, 
 went also hand in hand with a revolt against an older psycho- 
 logy, and with a great new movement of world-study both for 
 economic and for scientific ends. 
 
 It can easily happen that it matters less what men think, 
 than why they think it. The precise form and content of their 
 thoughts depend usually on temporary and local conditions, and 
 may change promptly in response to changes in these; and it 
 is the point of view from which they approach a new problem, 
 the predispositions which they bring, the training which they 
 have won from previous experience, which make the outcome 
 of their thinking so incalculable beforehand; so simple, how- 
 ever, and so instructive, when we come to comment on it after- 
 wards, in the light of history. This wider survey, to which 
 the historian aspires, permits explanation of things thought. 
 What neither historian nor psychologist can hope to do is to 
 explain the thinker of them, the hero or the genius. That re- 
 mains presupposed, a primum mobile, with effects, but no causes 
 within human view: and the biographer's business is twofold, 
 to follow forward these effects of the great man's interference 
 in affairs, and to follow backward (what does lie within the 
 field of history) the antecedents of those other factors of society 
 and culture, among which at that precise moment in history the 
 new force intervened ; the instruments, human and other, with 
 which he strives to realize what he has it in his mind to imagine. 
 The completed work of art, however, is not often quite wkat 
 
10 University of Calif ornia Publications in History [Vol.4 
 
 the artist set out to create. And this is just as true in the 
 history of thought as in the history of action which it is so 
 fatally easy to dissociate from it. 
 
 Now it is impossible to compare the successive presentations 
 of the pre-social state, without being struck by the widely dif- 
 ferent content of them. But how was it that the conception of 
 a pre-social state of man, whether conceived as a period of pre- 
 historic development or as the result of a psychological analysis 
 of mankind in society, assumed in different writers such widely 
 different forms, and led — as was only natural — to such widely 
 different proposals for the remedy of actual grievances? Why 
 should Hobbes, for example, describe the life of the natural 
 man as little better than a hell upon earth, "no arts, no letters, 
 no society; and (which is worst of all) continuall feare, and 
 danger of violent death; and the life of man solitary, poore, 
 nasty, brutish and short"; "no property, no dominion, no Mine 
 and Thine distinct, but only that to be every man's, that he 
 can get ; and for so long as he can keep it. ' ' How comes it that 
 Locke, whatever else he may deny his natural man, at all events 
 reserves to every man, even in his first Treatise on Government, 
 property in his own person, and (as a corollary to this) prop- 
 erty in the products of his labour, while in his second Treatise 
 he contemplates also a natural property in agricultural land? 
 How comes it, again, that Montesquieu bases the whole fabric 
 of civilisation upon the timidity of pre-social man; while for 
 Rousseau it is the utter fearlessness of the savage which most 
 distinguishes him from the craven members of societies? Flat 
 contradictions of this sort, between thinkers who were almost 
 contemporaries, and who agree so closely in the form and sys- 
 tem of their reasoning, clearly result not so much from any 
 defect of method as from some discrepancy in the data which 
 the method was employed to explain. The question, therefore, 
 begins to assume another shape : Whence did those political 
 philosophers, whose theories involved a state of nature, get their 
 respective data as to the character of natural man? 
 
1916] My res: Anthropology amd Political Science 11 
 
 It is common knowledge, of course, as I have hinted already, 
 that each thinker's own view of the nature of society went far 
 to determine his imagination of its origin; and that his view 
 of its nature was itself suggested by the political stresses of 
 his own time. Hobbes, for example, writing in the middle of 
 the Great Rebellion, was searching for a sovereign whose man- 
 date should be beyond dispute f Locke, standing in even closer 
 relation to the Revolution of 1688, was explicitly replying to 
 the advocates of a divine right of kings, and insisting that the 
 contract is revocable ; Rousseau, confronted with iniquities which 
 resulted from an antiquated distribution of privilege, is all for, 
 equality and fraternity as the necessary guarantees of liberty. 
 
 But it is possible also to put the sequence in the reverse 
 order, and to make the inquiry, how far each thinker's con- 
 clusions as to practical politics resulted from his view of the 
 nature of the State ; how far his view of its nature is deducible 
 from his beliefs as to its origin; and how far his beliefs as to 
 the origin of society were themselves rendered almost inevitable 
 for him, by the state of contemporary knowledge of the more 
 primitive specimens of mankind and of the State itself. 
 
 The "Geographic Control" of the Renaissance 
 
 That such a line of reasoning was not foreign to the political 
 thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is clear 
 from a variety of considerations. In the first place, the whole 
 movement in political philosophy, which is in question, stands, 
 like the political events with which its turning points are so 
 closely connected in point of time and personality, in the closest 
 relation with a larger contemporary movement of scientific in- 
 quiry, of which the inquiry into the antecedents of society and 
 of man is only one special, departmental, and relatively late 
 
 2 Hobbes, Leviathan (ed. A. R. Waller. Cambridge, 1907), p. 528: 
 "And thus I have brought to an end my discourse of CiTill and 
 Ecclesiasticall Government, occasioned iy the disorders of the present 
 time. . ." 
 
12 University of California Publications in History [Vol. 4 
 
 application. And in the larger sphere, also, a general advance 
 of physiographic theory had gone hand in hand with active 
 physiographic discovery. Bacon's enlargement of current ideas 
 of scientific method stands, as we all know, in the closest his- 
 torical connection with the discovery of a new world by Colum- 
 bus, and with the new prospects of exploration within the old 
 world which were opened by Vasco da Gama. It would there- 
 fore be natural to expect that Hobbes, for example, should re- 
 flect in his Leviathan the current conceptions of what pre-social 
 man would be like, as inferred from the behaviour and circum- 
 stances of Mwsocial man as reported by contemporary voyagers. 
 
 Two great events of this time, in particular, set the study 
 of mankind, no less than all the physical sciences, on a new pin- 
 nacle of outlook, and challenged all the theories of the Greeks 
 and Arabians which had done duty at second-hand to explain 
 the universe, since the great days of Alexandria. First, the 
 discovery of the Gape route to the East threw open to European 
 observation vast tracts of country and an immense number of 
 societies of men whose fame indeed had come down through 
 Pliny and Ptolemy, but whom no one but a few traders and 
 missionaries had visited in person, since the Arab and the Turk 
 tore East and West asunder and began to keep them so. Then, 
 within the same generation, the discovery of America opened 
 up, literally, a New World, wherein (among many marvels) 
 one of the things which impressed its explorers most vividly 
 and constantly was the presence of varieties of men whose mere 
 existence shook Adamite theories of mankind to their founda- 
 tion; who utterly failed to conform to the traditional require- 
 ments of the Flood, and professed inveterate ignorance on that 
 subject; and whose manners and customs — when indeed they 
 seemed to have any — betrayed a culture, or a lack of cxilture, 
 totally unlike anything which the Old World yielded, even 
 taking into account the barbarous Terra Nigritarum which lay 
 between the Canaries and India. 
 
 Thus almost at one gift three new sets of human documents 
 were presented to the philosophers of Europe: (1) first-hand 
 
1916] My res: Anthropology and Political Science 13 
 
 knowledge of the famous empires and kingdoms of the civilised 
 East, of India, China, and the parts of "India beyond the 
 Ganges," as the saying was, beyond the desert belt of Asia; 
 (2) fresh access to the black men, south of the desert belt of 
 Africa; (3) the discovery, beyond the no less desert ocean, of 
 new and Western ' ' Indies, ' ' peopled by wholly un-Indian tribes, 
 whose aspect was Tartar rather than Indian or Malay, and 
 whose behaviour seemed all the more inexplicable because it 
 differed totally from what was expected' so surely by the 
 geographers. 
 
 Bodin, 1577 
 
 It was long before this mass of new material could be com- 
 pared and applied by the philosophers at home ; but it was col- 
 lected and recorded with avidity, and the insatiable demand for 
 books of travel spread it broadcast, and made it sink deep into 
 popular imagination. Still, with all his learning, even Bodin, 
 writing in 1577, Of the Lawes and Customes of a Common 
 Wealth,^ hardly shows by an allusion that he appreciates the 
 new age that has dawned. There is a wonderful chapter, in- 
 deed, at the beginning of his fifth book, which is thus entitled: 
 "What order and course is to be taken to apply the form of 
 a Common Wealth to the diversitie of men's humors, and the 
 meanes how to discover the nature and disposition of a people. ' ' 
 Its contents show clearly what contribution he hoped to make 
 to the art of statecraft, and also what was to be his method of 
 research, to extract the truth from the mass of conflicting in- 
 stances. It contains the whole pith and kernel of modern 
 anthropo-geography, and completely anticipates the ethnolog- 
 ical work of Montesquieu; but the data upon which it is based, 
 are with a single exception such as would have been available 
 before the fall of Constantinople. His climatic contrasts are 
 
 3 1 quote from the English edition of 1605, "out of the French and 
 Latin copies done into English by Richard KnowUes, Author of the 
 Turkish History." 
 
14 University of California Publications in History [Vol. i 
 
 based on the Ptolemaic geography; he betrays no knowledge 
 of a habitable south temperate zone, and argues as if the world 
 broke off short at the Sahara. It is only by a curious after- 
 thought, which superposes on his classification of environments 
 from arctic North to tropic South, a cross-division by grades 
 of culture from civil East to barbaric West, that he betrays any 
 hint that his cosmography has been disturbed by the new age of 
 exploration. "The Spaniards have observed," he says, "that 
 the people of Sina (China), the which are farthest Eastward, 
 are the most ingenious and courteous people in the world; and 
 those of Brezill, which are farre Westward, the most cruell and 
 barbarous;"* so that East goes with South, and West with 
 North, and Bodin's cultural equator begins to lie askew be- 
 tween them; and we should note that the crucial instance 
 here supplied by "those of Brezill" is his single glimpse of 
 Columbian man. 
 
 He has indeed, full grip of the doctrine of a pre-social state, 
 and of the application of inductive proof to support it; but his 
 instances are exclusively derived from classical authors. 
 
 He that would see, he says.s what force education, lawes, and 
 customes have to change nature, let him look into the people of Ger- 
 manie, who in the time of Tacitus the Proconsul had neither lawes, 
 religion, knowledge, nor any forme of a Common weale; whereas now 
 they seeme to exceed other nations in goodlie cities and well peopled; 
 In arms, varieties of arts, and civil discipline. 
 
 A curious exception goes far to establish this rule. The only 
 instance which I can recall, in which Bodin refers to an event 
 in Negro-land, is where he illustrates the revolt of the Mom- 
 bottu Negroes against the Moors in 1526 (p. 555) ; but this was 
 an event, the news of which certainly reached Europe by way 
 of the Morocco ports, not by way of the southern route, or west- 
 ward down the Gambia ; it was also one which made a great 
 sensation in Europe, and was still a commonplace of cosmo- 
 
 4 Loc. cit., English ed., 1605, p. 562. 
 ^lUd., p. 565. 
 
1916] Myres: Anthropology and Political Science 15 
 
 graphers and moralists a generation later. In illustration of 
 this I quote as follows from Peter Heylin's Microcosmus :^ 
 
 The last Moroccan governor, Soui Halln, was slaine by Ischia, 
 Anno 1526, and the negroes againe recovered their long lost liberty: 
 Instituting divers kings, and among others, Ischia was worthily made 
 king of Tombutum. After this advancement, he quickly united many 
 of the weaker kingdoms to his owne, which at this day is the greatest 
 of the foure in whose hands kingly authority remaineth. 
 
 This actual example of a "Leviathan" in process of con- 
 struction was thus in text-book use in 1577, a generation before 
 the time of Hobbes. 
 
 Shakespeare's Caliban 
 
 The trend of popular opinion at the end of the sixteenth 
 century, as to the characteristics of the state of nature, could 
 hardly be better illustrated than by the Shakespearean concep- 
 tion of Caliban, "solitary, nasty, and brutish;" barely human, 
 in fact, but for his vices; living "like a bear" (as Montesquieu 
 so often puts it), grubbing roots, and plundering bees' nests ; 
 a prey to panic, haunted by the spirit of the power of the air, 
 and instinctively appeasing him, as savages do, by abstinence, 
 abasement,, and offerings. Mr. Hartland has only lately called 
 attention again to the truth of detail with which Caliban is por- 
 trayed, and Mr. Sidney Lee has gone at some length into the 
 question of his probable originals. No doubt there is in Cali- 
 ban a touch of the gorilla, pure and simple; and a touch of the 
 gorilla's own brother, the "Salvage Man" of heraldry and 
 medieval legend ; Linnaeus and Blumenbach, in fact, quote sev- 
 eral examples of such "wild men of the woods" who had been 
 captured in various parts of Europe, and described in books 
 before Shakespeare's time. But apart from his make-up — 
 which, in the Globe Theatre (as at Her Majesty's), was mainly 
 to tickle the gallery — Caliban is certainly neither ape nor idiot. 
 He has his own code of conduct (when he can bring himself 
 
 6 I quote the Oxford edition of 1636, p. 722. 
 
16 University of California Publications in History \yoi.. 4 
 
 to conform to it) ; he knows when he has done wrong; and in 
 his treatment of his invaders, of his small belongings, and in 
 particular of his island property, he corresponds too closely with 
 the current sixteenth century descriptions of the feckless, pas- 
 sionate "child of nature" to be set down as anything else but 
 an experiment in the portrayal of natural man. And if we 
 once view Caliban from this standpoint, it becomes almost in- 
 credible that he should have preceded Hobbes' sketch of the 
 state of nature by nearly half a century, unless Hobbes' portrait 
 itself was based upon a type already widely current, and gen- 
 erally accepted in popular belief. 
 
 Edward Grimstone, 1615 
 
 I come now to a work of which I would gladly have further 
 information. It is entitled The Estates, Empires, and Princi- 
 pallities of the World; it was published in London in 1615, and 
 it is described as having been "translated out of the French by 
 Edward Grimstone," doubtless the translator of Joseph Acosta 
 (1604) and Jean Francois Le Petit (1608).'^ I introduce this 
 work here for three reasons. It contains a fuller application 
 of what I shall best summarise as Baconian methods to political 
 science, than is easily to be found elsewhere. It shows very 
 clearly that by this time the new discoveries were already being 
 applied systematically to philosophical ends. And it illustrates 
 a remarkable series of coincidences of discovery which in less 
 than a generation were to have a profound effect on European 
 thought. 
 
 7 The Dictionary of National Biography knows nothing of this 
 Edward Grimstone. I have also no clue as yet to the French original, 
 and am inclined to suspect that "translated out of the French" is 
 an euphemism for anonymity. So, like his translator, "I will leave 
 him to your judicious censures, and to the mercie of the Booke-seller, 
 who it may be, will commend him in the sale, if he be not interested 
 in some other booke of the like nature." This is mock modesty; I 
 know no "other booke of the like nature" between Bodin and Hobbes, 
 and as Grimstone's volume is rare, I have not stinted my extracts! 
 
1916] Myres: Anthropology and Political Science 17 
 
 The treatise consists of a collection of studies of human 
 societies — avvrjyfievaL vroAiTetat, as Aristotle used to call them — ■ 
 which professes to be complete. Its title-page, engraved by 
 Een. Elstracke, is of a cosmographic type which descends, 
 for example, into the title-page of Heylin's Microcosmus a 
 generation later; but which is seen here in its pristine glory. 
 Four female figures, emblematic of Europe, Asia, Africa, and 
 America, advance to do homage to James I, who sits enthroned, 
 as he sits on Bodley's Tower in Oxford; and below are four 
 posed warriors, in the weapons of their countries. America 
 is represented by an obvious Aztec warrior in a peaked cap and 
 coat of mail ; but of the four women, America alone is nude : 
 even Africa is partially draped in a mantle. The distinction 
 is significant, for though Europe, Asia, and Africa all contribute 
 to the contents of the book, America provides no example of 
 a constitution at all: if it had any human inhabitants, they 
 were, for Edward Grimstone, in a pre-soeial state. , 
 
 A few examples will illustrate sufficiently Grimstone 's style 
 and method, his attitude towards the new and the older learning, 
 and his obvious debt to Bodin and to contemporary geographers. 
 His preface censures alike the mere complacent patriots 
 
 borne so farre in love with themselves as they esteeme nothing else 
 and think that whatsoever fortune hath set without the compasse of 
 their power and government, should also be banished from their 
 knowledge; [and the mere politicians] a little more careful, who 
 finding themselves ingaged by their birth, or abroad, to some one 
 place, strive to understand how matters pass there, and remain so 
 tied to the consideration of their owne Commonweale as they affect 
 nothing else, carrying themselves as parties of that imperfect bodie, 
 whereas in their curiositie they should behave themselves as members 
 of the world. [In such he detects] a childish and simple curiositie; 
 for what know they, if the commonweale, which containes them, be a 
 cage of fooles, and whether they have need to borrow something of 
 strangers, to better the Estate thereof, or else to settle themselves 
 there? And how can they judge if affaires in their owne Estate be 
 well ordered. If they doe not confront them with their neighbours or 
 
18 TJn iversity of California Publications in History [Vol. 4 
 
 wltli some more remote, to the end that they may repaire the defects, 
 or better the beginnings. 
 
 "And there are others," he goes on — and here his lash falls on 
 the rigidly classical humanists of his own day — 
 
 which lie grovelling in the dust of their studies, searching out with 
 the sciences the actions and manners of the Ancient, not respecting 
 the Moderne, and they seeme so to admire the dead, as they have no 
 care for the living. Of these three sorts of men, leaving the first to 
 their pasture, with Lyons and Beares; and passing over the second, 
 as incapable to see any farther, I wonder at the blindness of the last, 
 who being endowed with excellent spirits, and exceeding curious, fill 
 themselves with frivolous things, contemning the learning of that 
 which imports them most, and as a man may say, know nothing in 
 knowing all things. 
 
 What these classicists lack, in a word, is the "Science or 
 knowledge of the World," a good part of which knowledge "is 
 comprehended in the discourse of this book." And so 
 
 although my chief desseigne was to deal onely with politicke and 
 civile matters, yet to the end they might find all together, and not be 
 forced to seeke for the description of countries whose custome I repre- 
 sent, I have made the corographie, 
 
 ■which in the next generation Peter Heylin defines as the "exact 
 description of some Kingdom, Countrie, or particular Province 
 of the same." But after describing thus "all that the countrie 
 yeields and the beasts that naturally live there and have their 
 breeding," he adds 
 
 yet all this were little, to spend much time in the curious search of 
 things the which are void of sence or reason, if I should not show you 
 the man which dwells in evere countrie, and for whom all those 
 things seem to have been made, first in his ancient posture, and with 
 his old customes, either altogether or for the most part abolished, 
 then in his modern habit, either with more civilitie or with more 
 rudenesse, according to the changes and revolutions of the world — 
 for apparently men may become either better or worse to the end 
 that every man may judge which is the better of the two Estates, and 
 make use of part of the one and part of the other, having carefully 
 ballanced the most considerable particularities of both. 
 
1916] Myres: Anthropology and Political Science 19 
 
 He then explains that he must take account of their eco- 
 nomics,^ their means of self-defense,^ and 
 
 the principale peece of commonweales the which is Religion, whereof 
 I have discoursed, to show that it is the feare of some divinitie which 
 maintaines people in their duties, makes them obedient to their princes, 
 and divertes them much more from all bad desselgnes than armes and 
 souldiers which environ and threaten them. I do it also to show that 
 whereas religion wants, of what sort soever it be, policie and order 
 faile In like manner, and barbarisme, confusion, and rebellion, reign 
 there in a manner continually, whereas they that seise on them should 
 presently settle in their rude minds the apprehension of some power 
 over all to dispose of things at pleasure. 
 
 Here there is certainly a remarkable anticipation of a well- 
 known passage of the Leviathan; only the point of view is dif- 
 ferent, and the cynicism of Hobbes is well away. 
 
 Grimstone was well aware that he stood at the opening of a 
 
 new period of discovery. 
 
 I protest with trueth that if I have given any ranke or commenda- 
 tion to this worke, I will give much more to those that shall labour to 
 make it perfect, and that any- man may adde something dayly unto it, 
 for that from time to time they have more certaine advice from all 
 parts, especially from those countries which have not been much fre- 
 quented, either by reason of the distance, or for their barbarousnesse. 
 
 For his own part, however, he had clearly done his best with 
 the materials which he had. The "Order of all the Estates 
 
 8 "It importing little to know the actions of nations, if they had 
 not meanes to Judge by the commodities which the place doth yield 
 . . . and if withall they did not understand the meanes which these 
 people have to live in the Estate wherein they are borne; I have unto 
 their manners joined their wealth and riches, which show by their 
 abondance, how men which enjoy them have abandoned themselves 
 to delights or else given themselves unto Sciences, and by the want 
 thereof, in what manner some have continued rude and barbarous, 
 and others have applied themselves to arts and trades, to the end 
 they might repaire the defect of nature by the perfection of their 
 Industrie and labore." 
 
 9 "Moreover, knowing well that althoughe a countrie be furnished 
 with commodities which suffice or abound, yet the inhabitants are 
 subject to be dislodged, if they be not able to repell them which shall 
 undertake to wrest that violently from them which they hold, for 
 this cause I have presently, after the discourse of their wealth, added 
 that of their forces .... to end they may judge if the Estate whereof 
 I discourse may be easily overthrowne and changed." 
 
20 University of California Publications in History [Vol. i 
 
 contained within this booke" includes (besides all European 
 
 states) 
 
 the kingdomes of Tartary, China, Japan, Pegu, the Great Mogul, Cali- 
 cut, Narsinge, and Persia; the Turkes Estate in Europe, Africke and 
 Asia (including the ancient kingdomes of Egypt, Judaea, Arabia, &c.), 
 the empire of Presbiter John, the Estate of the King of Monomotapa, 
 the realme of Congo, and the Empire of Morocco 
 
 and consequently was very fairly abreast of the travels and 
 compilations of the day. His frank confession, therefore, that 
 he knows only this, and wishes to know more, coupled with his 
 total neglect of America, suggests that there may be real signifi- 
 cance in the nude American on his title page ; and that America 
 was not regarded as offering any regular constitutions. 
 
 Now it is certainly remarkable that, with the exception of a 
 few European republics, all the "Estates, Empires, and Prinei- 
 pallities of the World, ' ' which the author thinks worth describ- 
 ing, and in particular all the non-European states, are personal 
 monarchies of more or less absolute type : and this from a man 
 who is expressly throwing classical and medieval experience to 
 the winds, and setting out to describe men as he finds them.^" 
 
 Peter Heylia and the Cosmographers 
 
 Nor is this peculiarity confined to Grimstone's treatise. The 
 standard English cosmography of the early seventeenth century 
 
 10 A good example of his analysis is the opening paragraph of 
 his chapter on the Government of the Turkes (p. 1064) : "The govern- 
 ment of the Ottomans is absolute, for that great Turke is maister in 
 such sort, of all that is within his Estate, as the inhabitants tearme 
 themselves his slaves; and their is not any one that can say he is 
 maister of the house where he dwells, nor of the lands which he tills, 
 no nor of himselfe, except some families which were priviledged by 
 Mahomet the second at Constantinople; and there is not one in Turkic, 
 how great soever, that can assure himselfe of the Estate wherein he 
 lives, or of his owne life, unless it be by speciall grace from the Great 
 Turke. He maintains this absolute power by two meanes: the one 
 is, that he disarmes his subjects; the other is, that he puts all things 
 into the hands of such as have abjured the Christian religion, and 
 have been brought by way of tything from his Estates in their 
 infancies. By these two meanes he enjoyes two benefits: the one is, 
 that he deprives his provinces of the flower of their men, for that 
 
1916] Myres: Anthropology and Political Science 21 
 
 is that of Peter Heylin, the learned, witty, and pugnacious 
 chaplain of Archbishop Laud." Its method of treatment is 
 closely modelled upon that of Grimstone ; the sequence of topics 
 is the same, and there is a good deal of matter common to the 
 two, though Heylin, of course, is far more encyclopedic in his 
 treatment, and includes many regions and ' ' estates ' ' which do 
 not occur in Grimstone. Here, too, with hardly an exception, 
 the constitutions which are described are despotic; and, as in 
 Grimstone, particular attention is given to the brutal kingships 
 of Western and Southern Africa. Almost the only exceptions 
 are the cases where the royal power is not yet fully established, 
 and others in which, to the best of Heylin 's knowledge, there 
 is no settled form of government. 
 
 In fact, if an unprejudiced inquirer were to attempt, with 
 only the materials available in Heylin 's time, to generalise as 
 to the political evolution of the Old World outside Europe, I 
 do not see how he could fail to arrive at the conclusion: first, 
 that the natural and primitive state of man was, in the words 
 of Hobbes, "poor, nasty, and brutish; in continual feare, and 
 danger of violent death" ; and secondly, that wherever man had 
 emerged from this primitive condition it had been by sub- 
 mission, more or less voluntary, and more or less by way of a 
 pis aller, to an absolute despotism, usually exercised by a single 
 imperial master who, like Ischia of Tombutum, had superseded 
 by common consent a number of smaller despots. 
 
 On the other hand, the notion still prevails that American 
 man is nearly, if not quite, in an unsocial state; and it begins 
 to have practical consequences, to justify annexation, no less 
 than theoretical. For examples, see the passages quoted below 
 from the Microcosmus to illustrate the anthropology of Locke. 
 
 he makes choice of the strongest children, and fittest for armes; the 
 other is, that he armes and assures himself by this meanes." 
 
 Compare with this his "Discourse of the King of Monomotapa" 
 (p. 1092) who is served by Amazon troops, and guarded by two 
 hundred great dogs "the which he holds to be the safest guard." 
 
 11 My quotations are from the Oxford edition of 1636, entitled 
 Microcosmus: a little description- of the Great World. 
 
22 University of California Puhlications in History [Vol. 4 
 
 Thomas Hoiies 
 
 Hobbes himself does not often make mention of ethnographic 
 matters. His outlook is, of course, primarily political, and his 
 analysis, so far as it is not political, is psychological. More- 
 over, he is reticent throughout as to his sources. Now and then, 
 however, he does lift the veil, and betrays an interest in the re- 
 ports of travellers, and even a certain dependence on them. Even 
 erroneous generalizations are sometimes in accord with the 
 knowledge available in his time. Speaking of inherited distinc- 
 tions, for example, and in particular about coats of arms, he 
 says that 
 
 amongst the peoples of Asia, Africa, and America, there Is not, nor 
 was ever, any sucli thing. The Germans only had that custome, from 
 whom it has been derived Into England, France, Spain and Italy, 
 when In great numbers they either aided the Romans, or made their 
 own conquests In these Westerne parts of the world. 
 
 'In our present state of knowledge this is of course flatly 
 untrue ; but after some search I am not able to lay my hand on 
 an authority accessible to Hobbes who makes any mention of 
 such customs among recently discovered tribes. Neither the 
 Japanese heraldry nor the emblazoned tents of the Sioux and 
 Southern Algonquins, still less the so-called totem-poles of the 
 Vancouver coast, appear in literature till many years after the 
 time of Hobbes. 
 
 On the vexed question of the "naturalness" of patriarchal 
 rule, on which Hobbes differs as violently as usual from the cur- 
 rent Aristotelianism, we should expect some illustration from 
 recently discovered savages, if only for comparison with the 
 classical examples in Herodotus and the ancient geographers. 
 But the absence of such references does not prove Hobbes un- 
 acquainted with the literature of discovery, if only for the reason 
 that he omits equally to give authorities for statements of which 
 the accessible sources are known. His general attitude, though 
 not positively that of an anthropologist, is at all events in agree- 
 ment with the contemporary trend of observation. ' ' "^lien the 
 
1916] Myres: Anthropology and Political Science 23 
 
 parents are in the State of Nature," he says, "the dominion 
 there over the child should belong equally to both; and he be 
 equally subject to both; which is irapossible, for no man can 
 obey two Masters." In civilised states, he goes on, the law 
 decides whether the father's claim or the mother's shall prevail; 
 ' ' but the question lyeth now in the state of mere nature ; where 
 there are supposed no lawes of matrimony; no lawes for the 
 education of children; but the Law of Nature, and the natural 
 inclination of the Sexes one to another, and to their children. ' ' 
 "If there be no contract," he adds, "the dominion is in the 
 mother," and this for the same obvious reason as Heylin had 
 given already for female sovereignty in Borneo.^^ 
 
 It may be admitted at once that Hobbes' normal attitude of 
 opposition to the Aristotelian tradition is such that the mere 
 fact that Aristotle had laid down that "the father is naturally 
 in authority over the sons" may be held sufBcient reason why 
 Hobbes should decide for the matriarchate. But it is certainly 
 an instructive coincidence — and for my own part I am inclined 
 to regard it as more — that the first great groups of matriarchal 
 folk to be studied in any detail were precisely in areas now 
 being thrown open by the discoverers — Southern India, Negro 
 Africa, and North America ; so that, at this period, matriarchal 
 institutions, which had so long been treated as evidence of human 
 depravity, or, at best, as curiosities and antiquities, were being 
 rehabilitated for the first time in European thought as a prac- 
 tical scheme of society. Heylin had even generalised already 
 that female kingships were correlated with tropical elimate.^^ 
 Once more the circumstances of the age and the general progress 
 
 12 Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 20 (Cambr. ed, p. 140.): compare Heylin, 
 Microcosmus, Oxford, 1636, p. 830. 
 
 "Tlie inhabitants of this Island are so curious to have a lawful 
 Heir upon the Throne that the Husband not being certain the children 
 which he has by his Wife are his own, but she is certain they are 
 hers, therefore they rather chuse to be governed by a Woman, to whom 
 they give the Title of Queen; her Husband being only her Subject, 
 and having no power but what she gives him." (Quoted from Ta vernier 
 II, 140.) 
 
 i3 76i(J. 
 
24 University of California Publications in History [Vol. 4 
 
 of knowledge were forcing on the notice of the philosophers 
 fresh phenomena of a kind which precisely fitted the demands 
 of the philosophic situation. 
 
 Most important of all, however, is the direct appeal of 
 Hobbes to the evidence of discovery, when he is dealing with 
 the state of nature itself. 
 
 It may peradventure be thouglit [he says]i* theare was never 
 such, a time nor condition of warre as this, and I believe it was never 
 generally so, over all the world; 6Mf there are many 'places where they 
 live so now. For the savage people in many places of America, except 
 the government of small families, the concord whereof dependeth on 
 natural lust, have no government at all, and live at this day in that 
 brutish manner, as I said before. However, it may be perceived what 
 manner of life there would be, if there were no common Power to fear, 
 by the manner of life which men that have formerly lived under a 
 peaceful government use to degenerate in a civlll War. 
 
 Here, clearly, we have Hobbes the psychologist and poli- 
 tician supplementing his psychological and political evidence 
 from a totally different quarter, and in particular quoting 
 America as the last citadel of pre-social man. 
 
 To refer all governments, as he explicitly does refer them, 
 to the standard of Peru or Mouomotapa; to imagine the State 
 as a "Leviathan," a nightmare, a Frankenstein's monster, tol- 
 erable only because without it the life of man had been, and 
 would be again, "solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short," 
 was indeed but a partial inference from the life of "natural 
 man," as it might have been constructed from evidence which 
 was available even then. But it accords so closely with the ac- 
 cidents of contemporary discoveries, and with an actual tone 
 of pitiful contempt which had come in fashion among the voy- 
 agers themselves, as to force the conclusion that Hobbes was 
 really doing his best to state what nowadays we should call the 
 "most recent conclusions of anthropologists" on a matter of 
 practical concern, and that political science owes more than is 
 commonly supposed to this attempt to define and interpret large 
 
 14 Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 13 (Cambr. ed. p. 85.) 
 
1916] Myres: Anthropology and Political Science 25 
 
 new facts of human nature as the Age of Discoveries revealed 
 them. 
 
 John Locke 
 
 In the next generation the connection between "physics and 
 politics" is even more strongly marked. Closely as Locke was 
 allied, in his political aspect, to the leaders of the English Revo- 
 lution, he is still more closely associated with the first admini- 
 strators of the Royal Society, and that in more than one depart- 
 ment. His Elements of Natural Philosophy remain to show 
 how near he stands to Newton and the physicists; his medical 
 studies kept him in close touch with the chemists and anatom- 
 ists, and gave him a rational psychology ; and we shall see how, 
 intimately his psychological analysis is concerned with his gen- 
 eral anthropology. On the other hand, his interest in exploration 
 and travel was keen and continuous. It peeps out in his Two 
 Treatises on Government ; it is evident in his Essay on the Con- 
 duct of the Human Understanding ; it is confessed in a striking 
 passage of his Thoughts concerning Beading and Study for a 
 Gentleman ; and it bears remarkable fruit in his Introduction 
 to Churchill's Collection of Voyages, published in 1704, which 
 shows him thoroughly acquainted with a wide range of the 
 writers best qualified to inform him of the recent discoveries 
 in regard to unsophisticated man. 
 
 Thus the case of John Locke is rather clearer than that of 
 Hobbes. Here, too, though what impresses at the outset is the 
 dependence of his political theory upon the political needs of his 
 time, yet side by side with this we have the same intimate con- 
 nection between his politics and his psychology as is obvious in 
 the case of Hobbes, and it is naturally therefore to his psychol- 
 ogy that I turn first for indications of his method of work. And 
 we have not to go far into the Essay concerning Human Under- 
 standing before we have a good example of what I mean. In 
 the third chapter he is following up his contention that there 
 are no "innate principles" in the mind by an argument to the 
 same effect as regards moral, or, as he calls them, "practical," 
 
26 University of California Publications in History [Vol. 4 
 
 principles. Virtue is generally approved, he says, not because it 
 is innate, but because it is profitable ; nor do men's actions betray 
 any such "internal veneration of these rules." Even conscience, 
 which is usually represented as checking us for our breaches of 
 them, cannot be distinguished, in the mode of its origin, from 
 any other kind of human knowledge, and that in many cases it 
 is "from their education, company, and customs of their coun- 
 try" that men are persuaded that morals are binding on them; 
 "which persuasion, however got, will serve to set conscience at 
 work. ' ' Then comes the passage which concerns us now : 
 
 But I cannot see how any men should ever transgress these moral 
 rules, with confidence and serenity, were they innate and stamped upon 
 their minds. Have there not been whole nations, and those of the 
 most civilised people, amongst whom the exposing of their children, 
 and leaving them In the fields to perish by want or wild beasts, has 
 been the practice, as little condemned or scrupled as the begetting 
 them? 
 
 Then follows a list, a couple of pages long, of barbarities 
 practised by the Mingrelians of the Caucasus ; the natives of the 
 interior of Africa; the Caribbees of the Orinoco; a people in 
 Peru (who fattened and ate the children of their female cap- 
 tives) ; and many others. Among the Tououpinambos, another 
 American tribe, "the virtues whereby they believed they merited 
 Paradise were revenge and eating abundance of enemies; they 
 have not so much as a name for God, and have no religion, no 
 worship." Among the Turks "the saints who are canonised 
 lead lives which one cannot with modesty relate. ' ' 
 
 He that will carefully peruse the history of mankind [he con- 
 cludes] and look abroad into the several tribes of men, and with indif- 
 ference survey their actions, will be able to satisfy himself that there 
 is scarce that principle of morality to be named, or rule of virtue to be 
 thought on (those only excepted that are absolutely necessary to hold 
 society together, which commonly, too, are neglected betwixt distinct 
 societies), which is not, somewhere or other, slighted and condemned 
 by the general fashion of whole societies of men, governed by practical 
 opinions and rules of living quite opposite to others. 
 
 Here, clearly, Locke claims to support, if not to found, his 
 generalisation as to the nature of the human mind on a com- 
 
1916] Myres: Anthropology and Political Science 27 
 
 parison of specific varieties of human behaviour. At the same 
 time he makes definite exception of those principles which, as 
 he says, "are absolutely necessary to hold society together," 
 and these he is apparently inclined to regard either as actually 
 innate or at all events as of a higher order of universality than 
 the ordinary principles of morals. It is the beginniiag of a deep 
 distinction in anthropological theory, which bears fruit, long 
 after, in Bastian's distinction between Universal and Racial 
 Ideas.^^ 
 
 There are other passages in the Essay in which the same 
 argument is used, drawn from observation of actual savages. 
 In Chapter IV, for example, he gives a long list of tribes whose 
 members are devoid of the idea of God : 
 
 Besides the atheists taken notice of among tlie ancients, and left 
 branded upon the records of history, hath not navigation discovered, 
 in these later ages, whole nations at the Bay of Soldania (in South 
 Africa), in Brazil, in Boranday, and in the Caribbee Islands, &c., 
 amongst whom there was to be found no mention of a God, no reli- 
 gion? 
 
 He goes on to quote further evidence as to the Caiaquas of 
 Paraguay, the "Siamites" (which "will I doubt not be a sur- 
 prise to others, as it was to me"), and the Chinese. His authori- 
 ties in this passage are ample : Sir Thomas Roe, the hard-headed 
 English ambassador to the Great Mogul, and his French editor, 
 Thevenot ; de Choisy, for Siam ; La Loubere, for Siam and China ; 
 Navarette and the Jesuit Relations, for China; Ovington, for 
 Surat ; Martiniere, de Lery, and Nicholas del Techo. For South 
 Africa, of course, he quotes Terry, and through Terry, the 
 educated Hottentot Coore or Courwee, who came to England 
 for a time, and of whom Heylin, too, has a quaint story to tell. 
 And these are no mere gleanings from other people's fields. 
 Pew of Locke's contemporaries had a better right to an opinion 
 in the department of knowledge which now we should call 
 anthropology, and which formed already a principal depart- 
 
 15 Gemeingedanken and Volkergedanken. 
 
28 University of California PuUications in History LVol. 4 
 
 ment of geography. And he had the highest opinion of its im- 
 portance, for in his Thoughts concerning Beading and Study for 
 a Gentleman he recommends a list of original books of travel 
 which occupies more than a page. His own reading was enorm- 
 ous, and set him wholly free of compendia like those of Heylin 
 and Moll, which indeed he could compare and criticise as an ex- 
 pert. By a comparison of the libraries of Christ Church, of 
 the Bodleian, and of the Royal Society, it is easy to verify the 
 general conclusion that if the English gentleman, as Locke 
 feared, did not think it worth while to bestow much pains on 
 geography, it was not for want of available books or of examples 
 of distinguished publicists who were also good geographers. 
 And this is of some importance to my general thesis, for it shows 
 that in Locke's time still, as in the days of Hobbes and before, 
 inductive anthropology and inductive politics were greatly in 
 the air and were being studied together ; and consequently that a 
 political philosopher, no less than a psychologist, was addressing 
 a public which knew about savages and expected a thinker to 
 take account of them. 
 
 It is time now to turn to the Two Treatises an Government. 
 Their form was, of course, mainly dictated by that of Sir Robert 
 Filmer's Patriarcha, or the Natural Power of Kings, in which 
 the patriarchal theory of society, maintained with a thorough- 
 ness which would have delighted Aristotle, anticipates almost 
 verbally the orthodox criticism which was levelled two centuries 
 later at McLennan and Lewis Morgan. Filmer's attitude, in 
 fact, is exactly that of the Aristotelian and classicist thinkers 
 castigated by Edward Grimstone. He can quote Athens, Sparta, 
 Rome, and the Jewish patriarchs; he is learned about Nimrod 
 and Codrus ; but from beginning to end he writes as if America 
 and the Cape route to India were still unknown. Locke has ar- 
 guments enough, of a more relevant kind, to bring against Pil- 
 mer, and makes no direct comment upon the narrowness of his 
 experience of mankind; but implicitly his reply is precisely in 
 that form. It is an appeal to experience against authority ; to 
 
1916] Myres: Anthropology and Political Science 29 
 
 modern discovery in the new worlds beyond the oceans, against 
 traditional accounts of ancient societies in the Mediterranean 
 and the Semitic East. To refute Filmer's claim that patriarchal 
 rule is natural, he recalls the systematic fattening and eating of 
 children by the Peruvians,^'' and quotes a long passage from de 
 la Vega's History of the Yncas. On the question of the author- 
 ity of the law over an alien, the "Indian" is his typical example : 
 
 The legislative authority by which they are in force over the sub- 
 jects of the commonwealth hath no power over him. Those who have 
 the supreme power of making laws in England, France, or Holland, 
 are, to an Indian, but like the rest of the world — men without author- 
 ity. 17 
 
 Locke himself, indeed, was before long to be confronted with 
 this question in a very practical shape; for it was he who was 
 deputed to draw up a constitution for the new settlement of 
 Carolina, the first British settlement which came into direct 
 contact with communities of agricultural redskins of the Mus- 
 eogean stock, and consequently one of the first to be confronted 
 with any worse problems of expropriation than those which had 
 been described by Heylin.^^ 
 
 16 Ch. I, 57. 
 
 " Ch. II, 13. 
 
 IS Heylin, Microcosmus, Oxford, 1636, An advertisement to the 
 reader concerning America in general. "He that travelleth in any 
 Part of America not inhabited by the Europeans shall find a world 
 very like to that we lived in, in or near the times of Abraham the 
 Patriarch about three hundred years after the flood. The lands lie 
 in common to the Natives and all Comers, though some few small 
 parcels are sown, yet the Tiller claims no right in them when he has 
 reaped his crop once. Their Petty Kings do indeed frequently sell 
 their kingdoms, but that in effect is only the taking Money for with- 
 drawing and going further up the Country, for he is sure never to 
 want land for his subjects because the country is vastly bigger than 
 the Inhabitants, who are very few in proportion to its greatness and 
 fertility. . . . Sometimes whole Nations change their Seats, and go at 
 once to very distant places, Hunting as they go for a Subsistance, and 
 they that have come after the first discoverers have found those places 
 desolate which the other found full of inhabitants. This will show 
 that we have done them no Injury by settling amongst them; we 
 rather than they being the prime Occupants, and they only Sojourners 
 in the land: we have bought however of them the most part of the 
 lands we have, and have purchased little with our Swords, but when 
 they have made war upon us." 
 
30 University of California Publications in History [Vol. 4 
 
 In the very next section^" he is confronted with another ques- 
 tion of natural law on which the experience of the colonists was 
 modifying opinion profoundly: 
 
 It is not every compact that puts an end to the state of Nature 
 between men, but only this one of agreeing together mutually to enter 
 into one community and make one body politic: other promises and 
 compacts men may make with one another, and yet still be in the state 
 of Nature. The promises and bargains for truck, &c., between the two 
 men in Soldania, or between a Suris and an Indian in the woods of 
 America are binding to them though they are perfectly in a state of 
 Nature in reference to one another; for truth and keeping of faith 
 belongs to men as men, and not as members of society. 
 
 Here we have a clear anticipation of Montesquieu's position :^° 
 
 The law of nature is naturally founded upon this principle, that 
 the various nations ought to do one another as much good as possible 
 in peace, and as little harm as possible in war, without damage to their 
 true interests. . . . All nations have a law of nations. Even the Iro- 
 quois, who eat their prisoners, have one. They send and receive am- 
 bassies; they recognise laws of war and laws of peace. The only 
 trouble is that this law of nations is not founded on the right prin- 
 ciples. 
 
 Montesquieu, it will be observed, recurs here, like Locke, to 
 the "Indian in the woods of America"; and we shall see pres- 
 ently that there is a historical reason for this prominence of 
 the redskin in such a context. 
 
 One of Locke's main advances upon the position taken up 
 by Hobbes is in his treatment of the right of property:-^ 
 
 Though the earth and all inferior creatures be common to all men, 
 yet every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has any 
 right to but himself. The labour of his body and the work of his 
 hands we may say are properly his. . . . The fruit or venison which 
 nourishes the wild Indian, who knows no enclosure, and is still a ten- 
 
 ia II, 14. 
 
 20 Esprit des Lois, I, lii. 
 
 21 Ch. V, 27. Though the Tuo Treatises on Government were pub- 
 lished simultaneously in 1690, it must be remembered that the first 
 of them was written in reply to Filmer's tract of 1680, and bears 
 evident marks of earlier composition. It was indeed already out of 
 date in 1690; but for our present purpose it is this very circumstance 
 which gives it value as evidence for the growth of Locke's knowledge 
 and thought. 
 
1916] Myres: Anthropology and Political Science 31 
 
 ant in common, must be his; and so his — i.e. a part of him — that 
 another can no longer have any right to it before It can do him any 
 good for the support of his life. 
 
 Here Locke 's ethnological position becomes clearer still. He 
 is familiar with the hunting and berry-eating redskin of the 
 New England forests; but he is not yet brought into contact 
 with the agricultural communities of the Southeast; and still 
 less is he aware of the paradoxical behaviour of the later-dis- 
 covered Indians of the Chaco, where precisely that observance 
 holds of which he denies the existence — namely, that the actual 
 hunter has no recognised right to his game, and sits out, hungry 
 and patient, until the whole of the clan has had its fill. Locke 
 proceeds accordingly :^^ ' ' Thus this law of reason makes the deer 
 that Indian's who hath killed it. It is allowed to be his goods 
 who hath bestowed his labour upon it, though before it was the 
 common right of everyone." 
 
 His estimate of the agricultural skill of his "Indians" was 
 a low one :^^ 
 
 An acre of land that bears here • twenty bushels of wheat, and 
 another In America, which with the same husbandry would do the 
 like, are without doubt of the same natural intrinsic value. But yet 
 the benefit mankind receives from one in a year is worth 52, and the 
 other possibly not worth a penny: if all the profit an Indian received 
 from it were to be valued and sold here, at least, I may say truly, not 
 one thousandth. 
 
 Here again his experience does not extend yet to the agri- 
 cultural communities of Carolina and Georgia; it is the rude 
 husbandry of the Iroquois and Algonquins that is typical, for 
 him, of the natural state of man. More generally still, when 
 he speaks of the function and use of money, ^* he asserts : "Thus 
 in the beginning, all the world was America, and more so than 
 that is now ; for no such thing as money was anywhere known. ' '• 
 
 His views on the natural estate of matrimony are coloured 
 again from the same source. "All the ends of marriage being 
 
 22 § 30. 
 
 23 § 43. 
 
 24 § 49. 
 
32 University of California Publications in History ['V'ol- 4 
 
 to be obtained under politic government, as well as in the state. 
 of Nature, the civil magistrate doth not abridge the right or 
 power of either [parent] naturally necessary to those ends"; 
 a reflection once more of the many curious compromises be- 
 tween patriarchal and matriarchal government in American 
 societies, and particularly among the peoples who had partially 
 adopted agriculture — namely, the Southern Iroquois and the 
 Eastern Sioux of Virginia. America, as we see from the ex- 
 tract on money, though it is still near the state of nature, has 
 in some parts advanced beyond it ; but it is still to America that 
 he turns ' for examples of more purely natural conditions :^^ 
 "If Josephus Acosta's word may be taken, he tells us that in 
 many parts of America there was no government at all."^^ 
 "There are great and apparent conjectures," says he, "that 
 these men [in Peru] for a long time had neither kings nor com- 
 monwealths, but lived in troops, as they do this day in Florida — 
 the Cheriquanas, those of Brazil, and many other nations, which 
 have no certain kings, but as occasion is offered in peace or war, 
 they choose their captains as they please. ' '^^ 
 
 I will not deny [he goes on] 28 that if we look back, as far as 
 history will direct us [he might well have added, as far as ethnology 
 is any guide] towards the original of commonwealths, we shall gen- 
 erally find them under the government and administration of one man. 
 . . Conformable hereunto, we find the people of America, who (liv- 
 ing out of the reach of the conquering swords and spreading domina- 
 tion of the two great empires of Peru and Mexico) enjoyed their own 
 natural freedom [to elect a monarch], though ceteris paribus they com- 
 monly prefer the heir of their deceased king; yet, if they find him any 
 way weak and incapable, they pass him by and set up the stoutest and 
 bravest man for their ruler. 
 
 Once more America supplies the typical instance, and (once 
 more) that part of America which best satisfies Locke's descrip- 
 tion is among the hunting tribes of the Southern Algonquins, 
 
 25 § 102. 
 
 26 § 102. 
 
 27 Again he is quoting Acosta, Xational and Moral History of the 
 East and West Indies, 1604, I, 25. 
 
 28 § 105. 
 
1916] Myres: Anthropology and Political Science 33 
 
 with their elective war-path chief's, and regular deposition of 
 the war-lord as soon as his physical force abates. And once 
 more the comparative argument is pressed home, with a hj-po- 
 thesis of the graduation of culture from East to West, almost 
 in the manner of Bodin or Thueydides : 
 
 Thus we see that the kings of the Indians, in America, which is 
 still a pattern 0/ the first ages in Asia and Europe, whilst the inhabi- 
 tants were too few for the country, and want of people and money 
 gave no temptation to enlarge their possession of land, or contest for 
 wider extent of ground, are little more than generals of their armies; 
 and though they command absolutely in war, yet at home, and in 
 time of peace, they exercise very little dominion, and have but a very 
 moderate sovereignty; the resolutions of peace and war being ordi- 
 narily either in the people or in a council, though the war itself, which 
 admits not of pluralities of governors, naturally devolves the com- 
 mand into the king's sole authorlty.29 
 
 Here, at all events, is a quite unmistakable sketch of the 
 characteristic diarchies of the warlike tribes on the Appalachian 
 chain and its Atlantic slope — Creeks, Cherokees, and the like: 
 a tj-pe of constitution quite limited in geographical range, and 
 exactlj' representing in its distribution the outskirts of Euro- 
 pean knowledge in Locke's day. 
 
 Robinson Crusoe 
 
 I made ttse of Caliban as a poptilar anticipation of Hobbes; 
 as a sequel to Locke I cannot do better than refer to the savages 
 in Robinson Crusoe, and particularly to Man Friday. This 
 again is a composite portrait, the predominant features of 
 which come from the piratical Caribs of the Brazilian coast, 
 with their dug-out canoes, their simple weapons, their inveterate 
 cannibalism. This Carib tj-pe represents a qtiite different line 
 of observation from Locke's mainly redskin evidence, and the 
 novelty is the more important, since at the next turn of the 
 wheel Rousseau makes just as free with this very word "Carib," 
 
 26 § 108. 
 
34 University of California Publications in History [Vol. 4 
 
 as Locke has done with his "Indian in the forest," or as Mon- 
 tesquieu was about to do with his "Iroquois." 
 
 So far as any other element besides Carib is recognisable in 
 the savages of Defoe — and the portrait, as I have said, is clearly 
 a composite one — it is another eighteenth-century type, the 
 "South Sea Islanders," first popularised in England imme- 
 diately before the appearance of Robinson Crusoe by the dis- 
 coveries of William Dampier,^" which were at the same time of 
 great geographical importance, admirably described, and very 
 widely read. They figure repeatedly, for example, in the foot- 
 notes of Montesquieu. 
 
 But the point in which Defoe's savages date his book and 
 affect our present subject most clearly is in the psychology of 
 Man Friday. In particular, the dialogues between Crusoe and 
 his man on such subjects as the existence of God, and other test 
 questions of the day, are full of learning, and of ingenious, if 
 partly humorous, parody of current psychology and of the state 
 of nature. But to develop this subject in detail would require 
 a whole essay to itself. 
 
 French Canada: Sagard and Lafitau 
 
 On French thought, meanwhile, as on English, the natives 
 of North America had a very definite influence in the seven- 
 teenth century, though not quite in the same way as in Eng- 
 land ; for the natives whom the French encountered on the St. 
 Lawrence were of a different stock, lived in a different latitude 
 and climate, and enjoyed a very different culture. The French 
 colonists also had come with different predispositions, and were 
 struck by different characters in the order of things which they 
 invaded. Here, as elsewhere, a foremost place must be given 
 to the Jesuit reports — full and graphic records of native life 
 and custom, which were widely read in Prance, as elsewhere. 
 
 30 Capt. William Dampier, A New Voyage round the World, describ- 
 ing particularly the Isthmus of America, 1697. It will be remembered 
 that RoHnson Crusoe appeared in 1719. 
 
1916] Myres: Anthropology and Political Science 35 
 
 and have hardly been superseded even now. Another book 
 which became classical was that of Gabriel Sagard,^^ which was 
 well known to Locke, and is recommended by him, and was cer- 
 tainly a remarkable study of a barbarous people. 
 
 The full tide, however, of what I may call the Huron and 
 Iroquois mythology does not come till the beginning of the next 
 century. Another Jesuit missionary, Joseph Lafitau, produced, 
 in 1724, a large work entitled The Manners of the American 
 Savages, compared with the manners of the First Ages.^^ 
 Lafitau had only been five years in Canada himself ; but he had 
 the acquaintance of Julien Garnier, who had been in the mis- 
 sion field for sixty years, and spoke Algonquin, Huron, and all 
 the five dialects of Iroquois. Lafitau 's personal experience 
 was mainly among the Iroquois; he did not, however, confine 
 himself to the Redskins of French Canada ; he ranged as far as 
 the Eskimo and the Peruvians, and put together an immense 
 amount of information. For all his protestations to the con- 
 trary, Lafitau starts with a theory : 
 
 I have not been satisfied to understand the character of the sav- 
 ages, and to make myself acquainted with their customs and practices. 
 I have searched among these customs and these practices for traces 
 of the most distant antiquity; I have read with care those of the most 
 ancient writers who have treated of the manners, laws, and usages of 
 the peoples with whom they had some acquaintance; I have compared 
 these manners with one another, and I confess that while the ancient 
 writers have given me lights on which to base some lucky guesses con- 
 cerning the savages, the customs of the savages have given me light 
 to understand more easily, and to explain many things which are in 
 the ancient authors. 
 
 He regards the Odyssey, for example, as a collection of 
 sketches of primitive peoples, strung together on the thread of 
 an interrupted voyage from Troy, but having as their object 
 to recommend the study of ethnology. Manners, moreover, are 
 
 31 Gabriel Sagard, Grand Voyage au pays des Hurons. Paris, 1632. 
 
 32 Joseph Lafitau, Moeurs des Sauvages Ameriguains comparies aux 
 Moeurs des premiers Temps. 2 vols. Paris, 1724. 
 
36 University of California Publications in History [Vol. 4 
 
 to be studied to form — perhaps even to reform — manners, and 
 also to reform people 's ideas. For example, he says : 
 
 I have seen with extreme pain, in the majority of the Relations, 
 that those who have written of the manners of barbarous nations 
 have depicted them as people who have no religious feelings, no knowl- 
 edge of God, no object of worship; as people who have neither laws 
 nor administration nor forms of government; in a word, as men who 
 have little human about them except their faces. ... I know [he goes 
 on] that in these latter days people have wanted to shake the proof 
 of the unanimous agreement of the nations to recognize a Deity, as 
 if this unanimous agreement could possibly be a mistake. But the 
 sophisms and subtleties of some individual who has no religion, or 
 whose religion is highly suspect, cannot shatter a truth which has 
 been recognised by the Pagans themselves, which has been received 
 from all time without contradiction, and which we can assume as an 
 axiom. 
 
 Having said that it is an axiom, Lafitau proceeds rather in- 
 consistently to declare it his task to prove this unanimity of 
 opinion among all nations, by showing that there is in fact no 
 one so barbarous as not to have a religion and not to have 
 morals. "And I flatter myself that I make the matter so obvious 
 that no one can doubt it, unless he wishes to be blind in the 
 midst of light. "^^ He has a long chapter, also, on their form of 
 government, again with one eye upon Locke : 
 
 Of all the forms of government, that which has seemed to me most 
 curious is that of the Hurons and the Iroquois, because it is most like 
 that of the ancient Cretans and Lacedemonians, who had themselves 
 preserved the longest the laws and usages which they received from 
 the first ages of the world. Though this oligarchic form of govern- 
 ment is peculiar to them, the manner of dealing with business is pretty 
 general in all the states of barbarous nations; the nature of the busi- 
 ness almost the same, as well as their public assemblies, their feasts 
 and their dances. 
 
 His conviction that human nature is the same all the world 
 over comes out again later on.'^* ' ' The time which I spent among 
 the Iroquois has tempted me to describe their manners in greater 
 
 33 Lafitau, I, p. 20. 
 
 34 Lafitau, I, p. 25. 
 
1916] Myres: Anthropology and Political Science 37 
 
 detail, because I know them better and am more confident of 
 what I assert. Nevertheless one may say that the manners of 
 the natives in general are pretty much alike." 
 
 We are here already in the middle of a reaction, on the 
 one hand, against Locke's disproof of innate ideas, and, on 
 the other, against the belief that the savages of the New "World 
 represent, in any essential, a lower stage of culture than is to 
 be traced in survivals in classical antiquity. In fact, we are 
 on the straight road to the noble savage as we get him in Pope's 
 Essay on Man (1733), which uses Lafitau freely. But we are 
 also very much further still on the road to a synthetic ethnology. 
 Locke had pointed the way, in his Thucydidean comparison of 
 the modern Indian kings to the ' ' most ancient kings of Europe, ' ' 
 by which, presumably, he meant the Homeric monarchy. When, 
 therefore, the first curiosity and wonder began to subside, and 
 the real similarity in the performances of human reason under 
 similar circumstances began to be perceived, the foundations 
 began to be laid for a fresh statement of the characteristics of 
 non-social man. Whether the synthesis was to have a psycholog- 
 ical or historical content was still a matter of uncertainty ; but. 
 in spite of all his eccentricities, I think we may count Lafitau 
 as a pioneer of a new line of work. This at least he had of the 
 pioneer : his book succeeded and was much talked of ; he certainly 
 influenced Pope and his English contemporaries, and in France 
 he prepared the way for the decisive intervention of Montes- 
 quieu. 
 
 Montesquieu 
 
 It is easy to examine in similar detail the sources for the 
 ethnology of Montesquieu, who had of course a very wide range 
 of reading, and evidently made good use of his English acquaint- 
 ances, and his connection with the Royal Society, to keep him- 
 self well posted in current English exploration. He quotes 
 Dampier, the Becueil des Voyages, and the Lettres Edifiantes 
 repeatedly; together with Hyde's Persia, Chardin's Persia, 
 Pyrard's Turkey, Recant 's Empire Ottomane, Bernier's Kash- 
 
38 University of California Publications in History Vfoi.. 4 
 
 mire, Perry's Russia, Smith's Guinea, Kaempfer's Japan, and 
 a number of other explorers; and he has the immense merit 
 that he rises altogether superior to the current cant about 
 Caribs and Hurons. I doubt whether either name occurs more 
 than once or twice throughout the Esprit des Lois. Montesquieu 
 also goes far more nearly back to the geographical standpoint of 
 Bodin than any of his predecessors or contemporaries.^^ If he 
 does not, in fact, take rank as one of the founders of synthetic 
 ethnology, it is because, like his great predecessor, he was in- 
 clined to overrate the influence of physical environment, and 
 to neglect the human factor of racial momentum. But it is still 
 for the future to show whether it is Montesquieu or the ethnol- 
 ogists who are in the right. 
 
 Man, as a physical being, is governed [for Montesquieu] like other 
 material bodies, by Invariable laws. As a rational being hie is con- 
 stantly breaking the laws which God has established, and changing 
 those which he establishes himself. [He Is made, that is, for a life 
 in society.'] But before all these laws are those of nature, so called 
 because they are derived solely from the constitution of our being. 
 To understand them rightly we must consider what man was before 
 the establishment of societies. The laws of nature will be those which 
 he would obey in such a condition. Such a man would at first only be 
 sensible of his weakness. His timidity would be extrem^e, and if we 
 need experience of that, there have actually been found 'wild men' in 
 the forests: they are afraid of, and run away from, everything. In 
 this condition, each one feels his own inferiority; at best, if at all, he 
 feels himself an equal. He would never therefore attempt to attack, 
 and peace would be the first law of nature. 
 
 At this point Montesquieu quotes "Wild Peter," to whom 
 we must return before long, as a recent and notorious example 
 of this kind of natural man. From this standpoint, he goes on 
 to attack Hobbes' idea of a natural man, aggressive and domi- 
 neering, and concludes that, just as fear drives men to fly, so 
 signs of mutual fear would soon tempt them to draw nearer; 
 not to mention the natural pleasure which any animal takes in 
 
 35 See particularly Book xiv, Of Laws in their relation with the 
 nature of the Climate, where his geographical learning Is most dis- 
 played, and Book xi, of Slavery, and Book xvi, of Domestic Slavery. 
 
1916] Myres: Anthropology and Political Science 39 
 
 the society of its kind. His four "laws of nature," therefore 
 are (1) the sense of weakness; (2) the sense of hunger and 
 desire to satisfy it; (3) the sense of mutual support; (4) the 
 natural need of society in the sense of mere acquaintance. This 
 last alone is purely human. 
 
 It will be seen at once that three of these are concerned 
 merely with the maintenance of an animal life, and that so far, 
 Montesquieu is arguing on the lines of a purely zoological 
 psychology. It will also be clear that in the fourth ' ' law of na- 
 ture" he is either begging the question that man is a social 
 animal, or else he is appealing to experience of actual human 
 societies. 
 
 Montesquieu does not leave us long in doubt which is to be 
 his line of argument. In the very next chapter he argues that 
 "as soon as men are in association they lose the feeling of weak- 
 ness; the equality which existed between them ceases, and the 
 state of war begins. Each separate society comes to feel its 
 strength, and this produces a state of war of nation against 
 nation." For there must be different peoples. This last point, 
 however, he does not attempt to prove. 
 
 Therefore there arise laws, in the relations, in which these na- 
 tions stand to one another ; and these are the ' ' Law of Nations ' ' 
 — the Jus Gentium. 
 
 All peoples have a law of nations. Even the Iroquois, who eat 
 their prisoners, have one. They send and accept ambassies, they recog- 
 nise laws of war and laws of peace. The only trouble is that this law 
 of nations Is not founded on the right principles. 
 
 Here thep, as was by this time inevitable for a Frenchman, 
 Montesquieu is once more face to face with the Iroquois. Their 
 ' ' law of nations, " it is true, ' ' is not founded on the right prin- 
 ciples ' ' ; but a law of nature they have got ; and this is his proof 
 that there is a law of nature. But clearly he only proves this 
 if we are to assume that the Iroquois are in the state of nature ; 
 or at any rate so near to it as to be a fair sample of what human 
 behaviour would be, untrammelled by any positive or non-nat- 
 ural law. 
 
40 University of California Publications in History [Vol. 4 
 
 Montesquieu, therefore, like his predecessors, not only takes 
 full account of recorded observations of barbarous peoples, but 
 is directly and specifically guided in his argument by the last 
 new thing in current anthropology, the Iroquois of French Can- 
 ada, as revealed by Lafitau in 1724. 
 
 French Canada, however, is only a salient instance of the 
 fascination which America in general was exercising. 
 
 The reason wliy there are so many savage people in America is 
 that the soil there produces so many kinds of fruit on which one can 
 subsist. If the women there dig up a bit of ground round their cabin, 
 the maize comes up of its own accord. Hunting and fishing are enough 
 to keep man in abundance. Besides, herbivorous animals, such as 
 cattle, buffalos, and the like, succeed there better than carnivorous 
 beasts. The latter have had dominion from all time in Africa.se 
 
 Here the African lion and his human counterpart, Ischia of 
 Tombutum, is detected fading away before the maize-cultivat- 
 ing, ruminant-hunting American, and the way is being cleared 
 "by recent research" for the reckless, fearless "Carib" of 
 Eousseau. He notes, also, in Book xi, the social effects of the 
 lack of domesticable animals: 
 
 There is this difference between savage and barbarous peoples, 
 that the former compose small scattered tribes, which for certain 
 special reasons cannot unite; whereas barbarous peoples ordinarily 
 compose small tribes which can unite. The former generally pro- 
 duce hunting peoples, the latter, pastorals; 
 
 and so on, through a great mass of material, and (still more) 
 of broadly valid generalization, on which the work of a large 
 and industrious school of French anthropological sociologists 
 has done little more than comment and refine in detail. Earlier 
 writers had been precluded from this continental contrast be- 
 tween hunters and pastorals by the belief, current in Heylin's 
 time (Microcosmus 1636, p. 771, cf. 782) that there were pas- 
 toral peoples in Northwest America; an indication, as was be- 
 lieved, of their Tartar origin. 
 
 36 Montesquieu, Book ix. 
 
1916] Myres: Anthropology and Political Science 41 
 
 Rousseau 
 
 Rousseau, I need hardly say, remains something of a puzzle. 
 Like his predecessors, he comes at the subject of the state of 
 nature, in the first instance, as a reformer and a political 
 philosopher; and I am bound to say that it is only in propor- 
 tion as he feels the need of illustration, and realises that his 
 whole ease is hypothetical, that he is driven back upon ethnology 
 as an ornament of style and as a makeshift for proof. Unlike 
 his predecessors, however, he cannot be given credit for great 
 learning on the point at issue, and he frankly admits as much : 
 "As we know so little of Nature and agree so ill as to the mean- 
 ing of the word Law, it would be difficult to settle on a good 
 definition of the Law of Nature." There was, however, a good 
 deal known about nature in 1753 which was not in Rousseau's 
 philosophy. Yet he had clearly read travels, as everyone did in 
 those days, and he reproduces a few details as to the qualities 
 and customs of savages. 
 
 He quotes Peron's Voyages aux Terres Australes for tliu 
 comparative strength of Europeans and Tasmanians, and illus- 
 trates sensory acuity from Hottentots and Redskins; but his 
 favourite type is the Carib, whom we have already met in dis- 
 cussing Defoe. It is the Carib of Venezuela who shows such 
 surprising skill in tackling wild animals ; it is, too, ' ' the inhab- 
 itant of the banks of the Orinoco, ' ' who learned the use of ' ' those 
 boards which he applies to the temples of his children, and which 
 assure to them at least part of their natural idiocy and happi- 
 ness." It is the Carib again who "sells his cotton mattress in 
 the morning and comes with tears in the evening to buy it back, 
 for lack of foresight that he was going to want it for the com- 
 ing night," and whose happiness is, nevertheless, so quaintly 
 compared with that of a European Minister of State. There is 
 a curiously Amazonian flavour, meanwhile, about Rousseau's 
 sketch of the primitive family. 
 
 The most ancient of all societies, and the most nearly natural, Is 
 that of the family. But even here the children do not stay bound 
 
42 Vn iversHij of California Publicatians in History [Vol. 4 
 
 to the parent any longer than they need him for their own mainte- 
 nance. As soon as this need ceases, the natural tie dissolves. The 
 children, released from the obedience which they owed to the father, 
 the father released from the care which he owed to the children, all 
 return equally to independence. This common liberty is a consequence 
 of human nature. 
 
 Such an analysis is, of course, onlj- true in fact imder the 
 conditions of a tropical forest. Nowhere else does the family- 
 tie break down in the way Rousseau describes; and nowhere 
 was this type of social anarchy more open to study than in the 
 equatorial forests of South America. 
 
 Whence did Rousseau acquire his conception of the Carib? 
 The most obvious source would be the 17th volume of the Abbe 
 Prevost's Histoire generale des voyages, which contains a full 
 summary of the "Origin, Character, and Customis" of the Caribs, 
 and a narrative of European colonisation of the Antilles; but 
 this volume does not seem to have been published till 1761. 
 Raynal's Histoire philosophique et politique des establissements 
 et dii commerce des Europeens dans les deux Indes, published 
 in Geneva in 1781, is also too late ; but Raynal in particular had 
 a wide acquaintance, and his ideas were current in French 
 society long before his book came out; so we are probably safe 
 in crediting Rousseau with at all events a gossiping acquaint- 
 ance with a type of savagery which was enjoying a considerable 
 vogue in his time. 
 
 'V^lld Peter' 
 
 Both Rousseau and ilontesquieu were, of course, also in a 
 position to enjoy the perplexities of the advocates and assailants 
 of the doctrine of innate ideas when a real live specimen of 
 Homo sapiens ferus turned up in the Hanoverian forests in the 
 year 1724 and was canonized as a natural species by Linnaeus. 
 The story of "Wild Peter is probably familiar reading, but 
 though the literature which this poor creature provoked is in 
 parts diverting both to the anthropologist and to the philosopher, 
 I should encumber my story unduly if I digressed, ilontes- 
 quieu, having been in England and having his friends in Lon- 
 
1916] Myres: Anthropology mid Political Science 43 
 
 don, has not very much to say; but Rousseau gives Wild Peter 
 a long note, and was evidently considerably impressed. Buffon's 
 gyrations around this rather delicate topic are more entertain- 
 ing than philosophical. 
 
 The South Sea Islanders 
 
 Rousseau wrote just too early to be able to make use of 
 what must have appeared to his contemporaries a remarkable 
 confirmation of his view of the state of nature — namely, the 
 discovery by Cook, Bougainville, and La Perouse of the Poly- 
 nesian Islanders. But this discovery, coming as it did so closely 
 after Rousseau's manifesto, and so markedly confirming certain 
 phases of his sketch, seems to have attracted some attention 
 and to have been given more than its due weight. For it came, 
 at all events to the public mind, as the revelation of a new type 
 of man and society, still more remote from contact with the 
 modern world even than the Carib and the Iroquois, still more 
 likely therefore to have withstood the attacks of reason, if not 
 of time, and consequently to have preserved some traces of the 
 original state. The South Seas had, of course, been traversed 
 cursorily since the days of Magellan; Dampier had done much 
 to make their natives known; and I have indicated the share 
 which his work may have had in forming the portrait of Man 
 Friday. But it was not till after the publication of Rousseau's 
 Discourse that the significance of these data was appreciated; 
 and ethnology owes much in this instance to philosophy for the 
 impulse which was given in the generation which follows to the 
 study of "Pacific Man", in more senses than one; though I 
 think the debt is in part repaid when we see what Herder owes 
 to ethnology. 
 
 The Pacific Islanders, of course, with their Garden of Eden 
 existence, challenged all preconceived notions of the defective 
 mentality of races remote from Europe, and effected an almost 
 Coperniean revolution in the self-centered ethnology of the 
 discoverers. If a South Sea Islander like Omai could pick up 
 
44 University of California Puhlicatians in History [Vol. 4 
 
 Englisli, play chess, and behave like a gentleman after a few 
 months' consort with Europeans, there could not be much 
 amiss with his mind ; and it was clearly time to amend current 
 conceptions as to the identity of the primitive with the remote. 
 
 George Forster, for example, who wrote the first really 
 philosophical account of the voyages of Captain Cook, with 
 whom his father had sailed as one of the chief naturalists of 
 the expedition, was completely convinced by his experiences 
 that the Biblical record was true after all, and that the primi- 
 tive state of man was a state of innocence and happiness. It was 
 a reaction against the ideas of Hobbes, Locke, and IMontesquieu, 
 which went far beyond what was contemplated even by Ros- 
 seau, and it did more to retiard the progress both of anthropology 
 and a general biology than anything else in that century. 
 
 So long as the sentimental enthusiasm aroused by Rousseau 
 persisted, there was little hope of advance in the direction of a 
 solid ethnology. But in England the contagion was slighter, the 
 contact with the facts of exploration closer, and the reaction 
 earlier ; and Germany too was already well awake, with Herder, 
 almost before the Revolution was ablaze. 
 
 "I take this opportunity," writes Chamisso, who had himself 
 been in the Pacific in 1815-18,"^ 
 
 "to protest most vigorously against the term savage in its application 
 to the South Sea Islanders. I prefer, so far as I can, to connect 
 definite ideas to the words which I use. A savage for me is the man 
 who in the absence of fixed abode, agriculture, and domestic animals, 
 knows no form of property but his weapons, with which he main- 
 tains himself by the chase. Wherever the South Sea Islanders can be 
 accused of corruption of morals, this seems to me to bear indication 
 not of savagery but of over-civilisation. The various inventions, 
 coinage, writing, and the like, which are appropriate to mark off the 
 different degrees of civilisation which the peoples of our continent 
 have attained, cease to afford under conditions so different any stand- 
 ard for this insular and isolated stock which lives under this happy 
 sky, without yesterday or to-morrow, living for the moment, and for 
 pleasure." 
 
 37 Chamisso, Works I, 119. 
 
1916] Myres: Anthropology and Political Science 45 
 
 Voltaire 
 
 I must leave out of consideration here the results of these 
 successive pictures of the pre-social state on the course of polit- 
 ical philosophy. All I am concerned to do here is to give reasons 
 why these different conceptions took the particular shape that 
 they did, under the several circumstances of the age which gave 
 birth to them ; and I hope that I have been able to show that one 
 of the principal factors which determined their form was the 
 actual state of anthropological knowledge in the years which 
 immediately preceded the publication of each. 
 
 A good example — ^if this were the time to develop it fully — 
 is the very entertaining controversy between Rousseau and Vol- 
 taire over the psychical unity and uniformity of man. What led 
 Voltaire to a conception of the state of nature so totallj^ opposite 
 to that entertained by Rosseau? Partly, of course, his own 
 political and philosophic standpoint, with which we are not 
 concerned directly here; but partly also the circumstances that 
 in the years which immediately preceded his attack upon Rous- 
 seau, the learned world of Europe — and learned France in par- 
 ticular — had come under the influence of a fashion — I might 
 almost call it a craze — of enthusiastic admiration of China and 
 things Chinese. The Jesuit JMissions to China, in particular, had 
 been sending home wonderful accounts of the civilisation of the 
 Chinese, and fabulous versions of its antiquity; and it was, of 
 course, common knowledge in Europe in the eighteenth century 
 that any civilisation which went back into the second and third 
 thousand years b. c. must be in respectably close contact with 
 the origin of man, and therefore might be expected to reflect at 
 close quarters the outlines of the original state. To find, there- 
 fore, that this immemorial civilisation of China had existed 
 apparently unchanged since its first ages, was to discover fresh 
 light on the nature of man and a new glimpse of primitive 
 society. By this revelation of China, it is true, the Pharaoh's 
 heart of the ancien regime was hardened in pursuit of what has 
 come down into our vocabulary as chinoiserie; and, by a strange 
 
46 Viiiversity of California Publications in History [Vol.4 
 
 irony, one of the acutest critics of that regime was furnished 
 from the same source with a fresh instrument of proof of the 
 essentially social nature of man in reply to the Nihilism of 
 Eousseau : 
 
 Do you mean by primitive man (sauvages) a two-footed animal, 
 walking on its hands too if occasion calls, isolated, wandering in the 
 forests, pairing at hazard, forgetting the woman with which he has 
 mated, knowing neither her offspring nor his parents, living like a 
 beast, only without the instinct and the resources of the beasts? You 
 will find it in books that this state is the true estate of man, and 
 that we have merely degenerated pitiably since we left it. But I do 
 not think that this solitary life ascribed to our forefathers is in 
 human nature at all. If I am not mistaken, we are in the first rank 
 of the gregarious animals, much as bees, wasps, and the like. If you 
 come across a strayed bee, ought you to infer that this bee is in the 
 state of mere nature, and that those which work in association in 
 the hive have degenerated? All men do live in Society: can you 
 infer from that, that there was a time when they did not? 
 
 Man in general has always been what he is. That does not mean 
 that he has always had fine cities and so on: but he has always had 
 the same instinct which leads him to feel affection for himself, for 
 the companion of his toils, for his children, and so forth. That is 
 what never changes, from one end of the world to the other. As the 
 basis of society is always in existence, there always is some society. 
 We were not made to live after the manner of bears. [A clear hit 
 at the favourite simile of Montesquieu.] It is therefore demonstrated 
 that Nature alone inspires us with the useful conceptions which pre- 
 cede all our thoughts. In morals it is the same. We all have two 
 Instincts which are the basis of society, pity and justice.ss 
 
 Prom this fundamental uniformity of the human mind, which 
 Voltaire assumes and defends, it follows that certain funda- 
 mental ideas recur everywhere, under suitable circumstances, 
 more especially such religious dogmas as the conception of the 
 immortality of the soul. In this conception it will be seen that 
 Voltaire at the same time reverts almost completely to the an- 
 thropological standpoint of Aristotle, and anticipates by a cen- 
 tury the philosophic position of Bastian. But it is also clear 
 that Voltaire 's mode of arriving at the natural state of man does 
 
 38 Voltaire CEuvres, XI, 19, 21; see also Rousseau's reply to this 
 position, Discovrs sur I'origine et les fondemens de Vinegaliti parmi 
 les homm.es, p. 170. 
 
1916] Myres: Anthropology and Political Science 47 
 
 not differ in its method from that of his predecessors. Both alike 
 discover it by the process of subtracting from human nature, as 
 we know it, all that can be traced to the operation of any positive 
 prescription or observance. "What each side finds lying behind 
 this customary stratum of human nature, whether sheer passiv- 
 ity, or positive qualities of a selfish tendency, or otherwise, 
 depends as before, partly on the prejudices of the observer, but 
 mainly on the current phase of emphasis on this or that section 
 of what was known. 
 
 Christopher Meiners 
 
 The new attitude towards Rousseau is well illustrated by the 
 criticism of Christopher Meiners, whose Historical Comparison 
 of the Customs and Constitutions, the Laws and Industries, the 
 Trade and Religion, the Sciences and Educational Institutions of 
 the Middle Ages was published at Hanover in 1793. "Experi- 
 ence, history, and sound reason," he says, "are mishandled [by 
 Rousseau] with unprecedented audacity. On all sides false or 
 distorted facts are treated as fundamental, and the best known 
 and best attested observations are misinterpreted or left on one 
 side."^^ "Among the poets of enlightened peoples there is 
 hardly to be found any fiction so utterly in conflict with experi- 
 ence and history as Rousseau's picture of the State of Nature, 
 and of Natural Man." But Meiners' criticism is directed wholly 
 against Rousseau's ignorance of anthropological fact, and most 
 particularly of facts about "modern savages"; not against the 
 principles of his method. For, a,s Meiners himself contends, 
 
 The most important conditions in which considerable sections of the 
 human race have been or are now to be found, are the conditions 
 of savagery and barbarism, of incipient, or half-completed, or entire 
 enlightenment. . . . Human history devotes its particular attention to 
 the savages and barbarians of all parts of the world, who have never 
 produced the smallest perceptible change in the fortunes of humanity 
 as a whole; because often a single small horde of savages and bar- 
 barians can make greater contributions to the knowledge of human 
 
 'Vol. I, pp. 7, 16, 18. 
 
48 University of California Puhlications in History [Vol.4 
 
 nature than the most magnificent peoples who ever conquered and 
 devastated a continent. 
 
 And Meiners goes on to hit also Montesquieu for his failure to 
 appreciate the contribution of savages to political philosophy. 
 Here we have clearly the beginnings of the modern comparative 
 method, with its search of uncontaminated survivals of primitive, 
 though not strictly pre-social states. 
 
 Herder 
 
 But it is mainly to Herder that the expression of the new 
 movement is due ; and it is his Thoughts on the History of Man- 
 hind'^'' that makes the first sympathetic attempt to solve the 
 problem of the development of man and his culture, and to 
 create, in the modern sense, a science of man. 
 
 Already in comparatively early years, [he says] when the field 
 of knowledge lay before me in all that morning glory from which 
 life's midday sun detracts so much, the idea often besets me, since 
 everything In the world has its philosophy and science, ought not 
 human history, which after all lies nearest to ourselves, to have in 
 a general sense its philosophy and science also? 
 
 He argues, thereupon, that we must discard speculation and 
 follow experience simply. 
 
 When, therefore, we set about philosophising upon the history of 
 our species, let us forswear, as far as possible, all narrow forms of 
 thought which are derived from the culture of a single region, or 
 even of a single school. It is not what man is among ourselves, nor 
 what he ought to be in the conception of any dreamer whatever [this 
 is clearly aimed at Rousseau] but what he is, on the earth in gen- 
 eral, and at the same time in every single region in particular; or 
 rather, what it is to which the rich multiplicity of accidents in the 
 hands of Nature has had the power to train him. This is what we 
 are to regard as the purpose of Nature for him. 
 
 4" Herder, Ideen zur GescMchte der Menschheit, 1784. On Herder's 
 interpretation of the American evidence, see Learned, Herder and 
 America, in American Annals, N. S. II, 9. (Philadelphia, 1904) : and 
 on his sources in general, Grundmann, Die Geographischen iind 
 VolkerkundUchen Quellen in Herder's Ideen, Berlin, 1900. 
 
1916] Myres: Anthropology and Political Science 49 
 
 Herder, that is, conceives it as possible, at the same time to 
 determine inductively what man is in himself, and to determine 
 by simple description what he actually is (or rather what men 
 actually are) under the various different conditions in which 
 we find him. But he insists on the distinction between these two 
 modes of regarding man, or men ; and rightly, for it is the con- 
 fusion between the description of this or that kind of uncivilised 
 man — Iroquois, Hottentot, or South Sea Islander — and the guess 
 that uncivilised man everywhere must have such and such 
 qualities or defects of qualities — which had in fact produced 
 all the discrepancies between the previous theories of a pre^ 
 social state. 
 
 Writing when he did, Herder of course was but little more 
 capable than his predecessors of delineating human nature in 
 detail on inductive lines. His merit lies in the clearness with 
 which he gripped and stated the conditions of the problem; in 
 an- advance of method, which came just in time to guide the 
 theoretical treatment of a vast mass of new data. At the same 
 time he did accomplish a good deal, even as regards the filling in 
 of the picture. In particular, he marks the turn of the tide from 
 the philosophy of the pre-social state towards the old Aristotelian 
 conception of man as a social animal. Both Hobbes and Locke, 
 though not I think anywhere named, come in for effective 
 criticism : 
 
 There have been philosophers [he says] who on account of this 
 Instinct of self-preservation have classified our species among the 
 carnivora, and made out its natural state to be a state of war. Of 
 course when man plucks the fruit of a tree he is a robber; when 
 he kills an animal he is a murderer; and when — with a footstep, 
 with a breath, perhaps — he takes the life of myriads of Invisible 
 creatures, he is the most brutal oppressor on earth . . . But put 
 Man among his brethren, and ask the question, Is he naturally a 
 beast of prey of his own kind, is he an unsocial being? In his 
 physical shape he is clearly not the former, by his birth still less 
 the latter. 
 
 Herder is thus returning afresh to the Aristotelian con- 
 ception of the parental bond as the complement and remedy 
 
50 University of California Publications in History [Vol. 4 
 
 of the long helpless infancy.*^ Herder's ideal man has, in 
 fact, a humanity which is in itself an end, an ideal, not a pre- 
 soeial attribute, and just for this reason humanity exists 
 potentially in all members of the species, however small their 
 progress towards realising it, or however eccentric the results 
 of their social activity. 
 
 Look at the godlike laws and regulations of humanity, which 
 emerge, if only in the merest traces, among the most savage peoples. 
 Can they really have been invented by the exercise of reason only 
 after the lapse of thousands of years? Can they really owe their 
 origin to this changeful sketch, this man-made abstraction? I can- 
 not believe it, even from the standpoint of history. If men had been 
 distributed like animals on the earth's surface, to invent for them- 
 selves the inner form of humanity, we should still find mere human 
 stocks, without language, without reason, without religion or morals; 
 for as man was created such is he still upon the earth. On the 
 contrary, neither history nor experience shows us human orang- 
 outangs living actually anywhere: the fables which the late writer 
 Diodorus and the still later Pliny tell us, of 'insensitive' (dpaiadTiToi) 
 and other inhuman .men, either betray themselves by their own 
 fabulous quality, or at least deserve no credence on the testimony of 
 these authorities. No European people, still more no Greek people, 
 has ever been more savage than the New Zealander or the Fuegian, 
 at all events when we take into account the factor of climate; and 
 yet those inhuman tribes have reason and speech, and (in a word) 
 humanity. 
 
 Then he turns upon Locke : 
 
 All those traits of savagery (even granting that the Hottentot 
 buries his children alive, and the Eskimo shortens the life of his aged 
 father), result from a melancholy necessity, which nevertheless never 
 conquers the original instinct of humanity. 
 
 41 "He is received in the arms, and suckled at the breast, of love; 
 he is brought up by human beings, and receives from them a thousand 
 good things which he has never earned. To this extent is he shaped 
 in and for Society: without it he could neither come into existence 
 nor grow into a Man .at all. At the point, too, at which he begins to 
 be unsocial, and does violence to his own nature by coming into 
 conflict with other living beings, he is once more no exception, but 
 is acting in conformity with the great law of self-preservation which 
 is found in all created things." 
 
1916] Myres: Anthropology and Political Science 51 
 
 The Passing of the Pre-Social State 
 
 All these theories of a social contract as the starting-point 
 of human societies presupposed, as we have seen, that man- 
 kind had actually passed through a pre-social state; and the 
 proof which had been offered of this supposition, though 
 partly theoretical and a priori, had partly also been inductive 
 and based on experience. Further, the experience of "prim- 
 itive man" which was actually open to the philosophers of 
 the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, had been, in 
 fact, such as to force the conclusion not merely that a pre- 
 social state had once existed, but that some barbarous peoples 
 had not yet emerged from it. It was a sad error of observa- 
 tion, as we now know, which led to that conclusion; but, 
 given the travellers' tales, in the form in which we can read 
 them in the cosmographies and voyages of the time, I do not 
 see how that conclusion could have been avoided without 
 culpable neglect of such evidence as there was. If blame is 
 to be assigned in this phase of inquiry at all, it is to be 
 assigned to the travellers and traders, for making such poor 
 use of their eyes and ears. All, however, that I am concerned 
 to establish at present is this, that one of the most important 
 and far-reaching speculations of modern political philosophy, 
 the speculation as to a pre-social condition of mankind, and 
 a social contract which ended it and brought in society and 
 the state, arose directly and inevitably from the new informa- 
 tion as to what primitive man was and did, when he was 
 studied in the seventeenth century at Tombutum, or Saldanha 
 Bay, or the "backwoods of America," or the "bank of the 
 Orinoco river." 
 
 But the social contract theory has long since passed out of 
 vogue. In natural, as in political science, it has served its 
 purpose. Beginning, in the days of the discoveries, as a 
 plausible hypothesis which held together a number of casual 
 observations, and accommodated itself, perhaps all too well, 
 to the new contributions as they came, it excused three revo- 
 lutions, justified the annexation of a hemisphere, and guided 
 
52 University of California Publications in History ['Vol. i 
 
 the infancy of a new science, anthropology; provoking many 
 researches and much thought, of more permanent value than 
 itself. Only the gradual growth of fresh standards of evi- 
 dence, and fresh refinements of method detected its absurdi- 
 ties and confusions; till, with history and law pulling one 
 way, and psychology the other, the doctrine of a pre-social 
 state dissolved into its elements, and left us a mere phrase. 
 Nowadays, when we describe a person as being in a state of 
 nature, we mean only this, that like America on Grimstone's 
 titlepage, he has left his clothes behind. Political conse- 
 quences, indeed, of this group of theories are with us today, 
 like the political consequences of the belief in the divine right 
 of kings; but the theories themselves are dead, and likely to 
 remain so. Plato and Aristotle, with their belief in man as a 
 naturally social animal, have come by their own again, for 
 most of us, if not for all; and the search for an ideal state, 
 which shall realise and fulfil man's social instincts, is again 
 in full cry. 
 
 Four new sets of problems can be distinguished all clamor- 
 ous for a solution, and all failing to find this solution in the 
 theories of a pre-social state. Herder had been driven to a new 
 formula for the common humanity, by the diversity of the evi- 
 dence about so many "primitive" peoples, and had been led to 
 restate much of Montesquieu's geography in distinguishing be- 
 tween essence and accidents. The new science of geology, and in 
 particular the researches of Boucher de Perthes (1848-1858) on 
 the quaternary gravels of the Somme Valley, were seen to de- 
 mand such a vast lapse of time since man 's first appearance, that 
 the probability vanished that any set of men now extant should 
 have retained a "pre-social" culture. A new humanitarian- 
 ism, stimulated by practical applications of Rousseau's doc- 
 trines, based part of its case on the brotherhood of man, and 
 was met by the objection that men were not brothers, at all 
 events when one is white and one is black. And the acci- 
 dents of their birth gave Europe a new philosophy of lan- 
 guage and of law which seemed to vindicate Aristotle on a 
 
1916] Myres: Anthropology and Political Science 53 
 
 point where he had been most ruthlessly attacked by Hobbes, 
 namely as to the naturalness of paternal, as opposed to 
 maternal authority. Comparative ethnology, prehistoric arch- 
 aeology, polygenism, and the patriarchal theory (the political 
 counterpart of Aryanism) advanced on parallel lines over 
 the ruins of the social contact. Not all these new enquiries, 
 and appeals to fresh evidence, affected political science 
 appreciably. Archaeology had least of all to say, for it was 
 concerned with the productive, not with the social arts; with 
 technology, not with institutions. Only as the humanist 
 handmaid of geology did it lend a hand in the fight for a 
 sane interpretation of Genesis. Herder's contribution has 
 been estimated already; it had much to do with the first 
 formulation of that doctrine of nationality which checked 
 the career of Napoleon, and still is the largest force in inter- 
 national thought. 
 
 What part, if any, has the direct study of barbarous people 
 played at this fresh turn of the wheel? Let us look once 
 again at the state of geographical knowledge, and more par- 
 ticularly, as before, at the regions in which by transitory 
 chance of circumstances, there was most to be learned at the 
 moment. 
 
 The Patriarchal Theory 
 
 In the first place, economic and political causes were lead- 
 ing throughout the eighteenth century towards the formal 
 declaration of European rule over large parts of India; and 
 it was inevitable that one of the first consequences of this 
 should be the discovery by the new rulers of India that the dom- 
 inant civilization of the country was at the same time rigidly 
 patriarchal in structure, highly intolerant of change, and 
 apparently also of very ancient date. That the practical prob- 
 lems of administration were most urgent in northern India 
 was yet another of those accidental circumstances which make 
 and mar philosophies; for it veiled from view the peaceful 
 southern matriarchates, and focused the attention of states- 
 men and theorists alike on the pugnacious patriarchs of the 
 
54 University of California Publications in History [Vol. 4 
 
 north. The necessary result was the growth, in England, of a 
 new school of comparative jurisprudence, for which Montes- 
 quieu and Blackstone had already made clear the way; which 
 reaches its finest flower and certainly its widest vogue in the 
 writings of Sir Henry Maine. For it was not only for the 
 government of India that the new learning brought new light : 
 the discovery of ancient Indian law threw the study of Roman 
 law into an entirely new perspective, and furnished that 
 great monument of tradition and of observation with a deep 
 and strongly-featured background. From this new point of 
 view, the Aristotelian doctrine as to the naturalness of patri- 
 archal society seemed to gain new validity, as the basis of 
 induction widened; and since early Semitic society, and the 
 primeval society of Semitic tradition and legend, were rigidly 
 patriarchal also, an even wider comparison, embracing India, 
 Arabia, and ancient Europe in the same survey, seemed to 
 justify the belief, which had always remained popular in 
 Europe, that the primitive state of man had been neither 
 pre-soeial nor nasty and brutish at all; but in the best sense 
 "very good". 
 
 The patriarchal theory dominated political science for 
 nearly fifty years. "The effect of the evidence derived from 
 comparative jurisprudence," Sir Henry Maine could write in 
 1861," 
 
 is to establish that view of the primeval conditions of the human 
 race which is known as the patriarchal theory. There is no doubt, of 
 course, that this theory was originally based on the Scriptural 
 theory of the Hebrew patriarchs in Lower Asia.*3 it is to be noted, 
 
 •42 Maine, Ancient Law, pp. 122-3. 
 
 43 Maine digresses here to deal with historical reasons for its 
 neglect: "But, as has been explained already, its connexion with 
 Scripture rather militated than otherwise against its reception as a 
 complete theory, since the majority of the enquirers who till recently 
 addressed themselves with most earnestness to the colligation of social 
 phenomena, were either influenced by the strongest prejudice against 
 Hebrew antiquities, or by the strongest desire to construct their 
 system without the assistance of religious records. Even now [1861] 
 there is perhaps a disposition to undervalue these accounts, or rather 
 to decline generalizing from them, as forming part of the traditions 
 of a Semitic people." Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum. 
 
1916] Myres: Anthropology and Political Science 55 
 
 however, that the legal evidence comes nearly exclusively from the 
 institutions of societies belonging to the Indo-European stock, the 
 Romans, Hindoos, and Slavonians supplying the greater part of it; 
 and indeed the difficulty, at the present stage of the inquiry, is to know- 
 where to stop; to say of what races of men it is- not allowable to lay 
 down that the society in which they are united was originally organ- 
 ised on the patriarchal model. 
 
 And he refers explicitly to the former controversy between 
 Pilmer and Locke, to point out how the tables had now been 
 turned upon the latter. 
 
 Thus in the half-century which intervenes between Herder 
 and Maine, the political philosophy of Europe seemed to have 
 turned almost wholly from exploration to introspection; from 
 the Pacific to early Rome and the German forests; and from 
 the study of survivals in the modern practice of savages, to 
 that of primeval custom betrayed by the speech and customs 
 of the civilised world. It was Aristotle over again, with his 
 appeal to custom, ancestral belief, and canonical literature, 
 following hard upon the heels of the visionary revolutionary 
 Plato. Maine's own words, indeed, about Rousseau*^* would be 
 applicable almost without change to the course of Greek 
 thought in the fourth century b. c. : 
 
 We have never seen in our own generation, [he says] indeed the 
 world has not seen more than once or twice in all the course of history, 
 a literature which has exercised such prodigious influence over the 
 minds of men, over every cast and shade of intellect, as that which 
 emanated from Rousseau between 1749 and 1762. It was the first 
 attempt to re-erect the edifice of human belief after the purely icono- 
 clastic efforts commenced by Bayle, and in part by our own Locke, 
 and consummated by Voltaire; and besides the superiority which every 
 constructive effort will always enjoy over one that is merely destruc- 
 tive, it possessed the immense advantage of appearing amid an all 
 but universal scepticism as to the soundness of all foregone knowledge 
 in matters speculative. . . . The great difference between the 
 views is that one bitterly and broadly condemns the present for its 
 unlikeness to the ideal past, while the other, assuming the present to 
 be as necessary as the past, does not affect to disregard or censure it. 
 
 I have devoted some space to these first steps of lin- 
 is^ibid., pp. 86-9. 
 
56 University of California Publications in History [Vol. 4 
 
 guistie paleontology and comparative jurisprudence because the 
 method of inquiry which they announced promised at first 
 sight to make good a very serious defect in the instruments 
 of anthropological research. Human history, outside of 
 Europe and of one or two great oriental states like China, 
 hardly went back beyond living memory; even Mexico had 
 no chronicles beyond the first few hundred years, and the 
 records of old-world states like China, which at first sight 
 offered something, turned out on examination to have least 
 to give. They had lived long, it is true, but their lives had 
 been "childlike and bland," devoid of change, and almost 
 empty of experience. Consequently there was no proof that 
 the "wild men" of the world's margins and byways were 
 really primitive at all. The churches held them children of 
 wrath, degenerate offspring of Cain ; the learned fell back 
 upon pre-Adamite fictions, to palliate, rather than to explain 
 their invincible ignorance of Europe and its ways. Here, 
 however, in the new light thrown by the history of speech, 
 there seemed to be a prospect of deep insight into the history 
 of human societies. Disillusionment came in due course, 
 when doctors disagreed; but illusion need never have taken 
 the form it did, had either the philologists or the philoso- 
 phers realised that all the really valuable work was being 
 done within the limits of a single highly special group of 
 tongues; that the very circumstance that this group of 
 tongues had spread so widely, pointed to some strong impulse 
 driving the men who spoke them into far-reaching migra- 
 tions; that one of the few points upon which linguistic 
 paleontologists were really unanimous was that both the Indo- 
 European and the Semitic peoples, in their primitive condi- 
 tion, were purely pastoral; and that this pastoral habit was 
 itself an almost coercive cause for their uniformly patriarchal 
 organisation. The last point, however, belongs so completely 
 to another phase of our story that it is almost an anachronism 
 to introduce it here. It serves, however, to indicate, once 
 again, if that be necessary, how completely the philosopher. 
 
1916] Myres: Anthropology and Political Science 57 
 
 and even the man of science, is at the mercy of events in the 
 ordering of his search after knowledge. It is, indeed, almost 
 true to say that if the primitive Aryan had not had the good 
 fortune not merely to live on a grass-land, but also to find 
 domesticable quadrupeds there, there could no more have 
 been a science of comparative philology in modern Europe, 
 than there could be among the natives of your own Great 
 Plains or of the Pacific Coast: for in no other event would 
 there have been any such family of languages to compare. 
 
 In the absence of warning thoughts like these, however, 
 the comparative philology and the comparative law of the 
 patriarchal peoples of the Northwest Quadrant and of India 
 went gaily on. What Maine had done for India, Maine him- 
 self, with Sohm and von Maurier, in Germany, Le Play, de 
 Laveleye, and d'Arbois de Jubainville in France and Bel- 
 gium, "W. F. Skene in far-off Scotland, Whitley Stokes and 
 others in Ireland, Rhys in Wales, and Mackenzie Wallace and 
 Kovalevsky in Russia, had done for the early institutions of 
 their respective countries; all emphasising alike the wide 
 prevalence of the same common type of social structure, 
 based upon the same central institution, the patriarchal 
 family, with the Patria Potestas of its eldest male member as 
 its overpowering bond of union; and Maine's own words do 
 not the least exaggerate the beliefs and expectations which 
 were evoked by this new aspect of the study of man. 
 
 Maine himself, indeed, seems to have realized (I. c, p. 130) 
 that "the earliest and most extensively employed of legal 
 fictions is that which permitted family relations to be created 
 artificially, and there is none to which I conceive mankind to 
 be more deeply indebted;" and a similar fiction was exten- 
 sively employed by comparative ethnologists as well, to 
 explain away eases which did not seem to come under the 
 rule. Yet only on one point does Maine seem to hesitate 
 at all: 
 
 The conclusion then which is supported by the evidence is, not 
 that all early societies were formed by descent from the same ancestor, 
 
58 University of California Publications in History [Vol.4 
 
 but that all of them wlilch had any permanence or solidity were so 
 descended, or assumed that they were. An indefinite number of causes 
 may have shattered the primitive groups, but wherever their ingredi- 
 ents recombined, it was on the model or principle of an association 
 of kindred. Whatever were the facts, all thought, language, and law 
 adjusted themselves to the assumption. (.1. c, pp. 131-2.) 
 
 No feature of the rudimentary associations of mankind is deposed 
 to by a greater amount of evidence than this; and yet none seems to 
 have disappeared so generally and so rapidly from the usages of 
 advancing communities. (I. c, p. 135.) 
 
 Yet even this sweeping generalization is supported only by 
 examples from Indo-European peoples. It is Aristotle 's assump- 
 tion, over again, of the universality of the Greek city-state, an 
 organism as rigidly delimited by geographical and economic 
 circumstances as the patriarchal family itself. 
 
 Comparative Philology delimits the "Aryan Home" 
 
 The "Indo-European" challenge to the comparative study 
 of the patriarchal societies was accompanied, step by step, by 
 another Indo-European parallel of hardly less importance. 
 It was forced, indeed, into greater absurdities by its more 
 enthusiastic advocates, but embracing as it did the whole 
 range of the nameable works of man, it led inevitably, at the 
 last, back to the consideration of geographic environment 
 and to a realization of the local limitations of the Indo- 
 European regime, extensive though its frontiers were. There 
 had been intermittent speculation, from the sixteenth century 
 onward, as to the significance, and the probable cause, of the 
 resemblances which every scholar felt to exist between Ian- 
 gauges so remote geographically as German and Persian; but 
 it was not until the discovery of Sanskrit — itself an immedi- 
 ate fruit of the British occupation of India — that the proof 
 became convincing that the resemblances between the lan- 
 guages of the Greeks, Romans, and Teutons, on the one hand, 
 and of the Sanskrit-speaking lords of northern India on the 
 other, were such as to show that these languages were 
 derived from a common source : that it was the differences 
 between them, not their resemblances, which stood in need of 
 
1916] Myres: Anthropology and Political Scitnce 59 
 
 explanation by the secondary and subsequent action of time, 
 climate, and customs. This conclusion was reached inde- 
 pendently and almost simultaneously by Sir William Jones 
 in 1786,** by Frater Paulinus a Saneto Bartholomaeo in 
 1798,*^ and by Johann Christoph Adelung in 1806.*^ The 
 last-named, by the way, had already in 1781*^ carried war 
 into the other camp by his attack on the prevalent traditio}i 
 that the earliest and only original language of mankind was 
 Hebrew; and he remained in the belief that there was no 
 case yet for enthroning any other language in its place; 
 "Noah's Ark, for me, is a closed fortress," he said; "and 
 the ruins of Babylon need fear no molestation from me."*" 
 But his successors were less cautious, and Noah's Ark seemed 
 likely to float far away from Ararat, upon a new flood of phil- 
 ological literature. Rhode*^ seems to have been the first, in 
 1820, to draw from linguistic similarities geographical con- 
 clusions as to an "Aryan Home," which he placed in Central 
 Asia. Lassen^" in 1847, proposed southwestern Persia as an 
 analogous "Home of the Semites", and lent his great author- 
 ity to the hypothesis of a common place of origin for the 
 primitive Semites and Aryans. Crawfurd"^ meanwhile in 
 1820 had applied the same new science of comparative phil- 
 ology to the principal linguistic groups of the Pacific, Polyne- 
 sian and Malay; and was one of the very first to take the 
 further step, and argue that if two peoples retained the same 
 names for things, they must be held to have had those things 
 in use and in mind, before they became separated in language 
 
 ** Sir Wm. Jones, in AsiaticTt Researches, I, p. 422. 
 
 45 Fa. Paulinus, Dissertatio de antiquitate et affinitate linguae 
 zendicae, sanscridanicae, et germanicae, Padua, 1798. 
 
 *e J. C. Adelung, Mithradates oder allegerneine Sprachenkunde I, 
 Berlin, 1806. 
 
 !i7 J, C. Adelung, Ve'ber die Geschichte der deutscUen Sprache, 
 Leipzig, 1781. 
 
 48 J. C. Adelung, Mithradates I, p. 11. 
 
 49 J. G. Rhode, Die heilige Sage des Zendvolkes, Frankfurt, 1820. 
 60 Ch. Lassen, Indische Alterthumskunde, 1847. 
 
 51 J. Crawfurd, History of the Indian Archipelago, London, 1820. 
 
60 University of California Publications in History [^oi" * 
 
 or abode. Crawfurd's sketch of aboriginal Polynesian 
 society and culture deals mainly, it is true, with malterial 
 arts and means of subsistence; and Von Klaproth 's''^ applica- 
 tion of the same method in 1830 to Indo-European languages 
 turned on the names of plants. Eichhoff was the first to 
 show, by systematic parallel lists of words for the family and 
 society, how "this rich and tenacious civilization propagated 
 itself in a thousand different degrees, but always in similar 
 stocks and in regular ramifications, . . . over the enorm- 
 ous area that civilization now covers, and whose borders are 
 daily extending"; but it was Kuhn^^ in 1845 who finally 
 wedded comparative philology with comparative law, by his 
 proposal "to advance from the conclusion that all these great 
 peoples are related to one another, to a further conclusion, 
 the establishment of the main features of the state of the 
 original people in the days before they separated." Kuhn's 
 work, however, brilliant as it was, was superseded within 
 three years by a philologist of the first rank, Jacob Grimm, °* 
 and it was Kuhn's second edition, which appeared in 1850, 
 almost wholly re-written, which is the real cornerstone of 
 linguistic paleontology; his Journal for the Comparative Phil- 
 ology of German, Greek and Latin'^ was founded in the follow- 
 ing year, 1851, and it is this mass of materials which underlay 
 the first popular application of the new method to classical 
 studies, in Mommsen's great History of Rome,^^ which began to 
 appear in 1854. 
 
 Kuhn's argument was restated and carried somewhat further 
 by Benfey, in his preface to Fick's Vergleichendes Worteriuch 
 der Indogermanischen Sprachen, which appeared in 1868. By 
 
 52 J. von Klaproth, Nouveau Journal Asiatiqiie, p. 112, 1830. Asia 
 Polyglotta .... 1831. 
 
 53 A. Kuhn, Zur altesten Geschichte der Indo-Germanischen Volker, 
 Berlin, 1845 (second edition, 1850), p. 2. 
 
 54 Grimm, Geschichte der deutschen Sprache, 1848. 
 
 55 Kuhn, Zeitschrift fiir vergleichende Sprachforschung auf dem 
 Geiiete des deutschen, griechischen und lateinischen. 
 
 56 Mommsen, Romische Geschichte, Berlin, 1854. 
 
1916] Myres: Anthropology and Political Science 61 
 
 this time the archeologieal evidence for the antiquity of some 
 kind of man in Europe had been summarized and made accessible 
 in Lubbock's Pre-historic Times (1862) : and this of course made 
 impossible for ever such a position in regard to the population of 
 Europe as had been taken by Mommsen in regard to Italy only 
 three years before. 
 
 Geiger's analysis of the Indo-European tree names, a further 
 revision of Kuhn's work, appeared in 1871,^' and makes a 
 positive claim for an Aryan home "somewhere in Europe", 
 namely in central and western Germany; one of the first fruits 
 in the long recrimination between anthropologists east and west 
 of the Rhine, which followed the Franco-Prussian War. 
 
 A further important step belongs also to the year 1871.^* 
 Kuno was, I think, the first to lay stress on the consideration that 
 a family of languages presupposed not merely a single original 
 language, but geographical circumstances favorable to its gradual 
 differentiation, and at the same time to its essential coherence. 
 Such geographical conditions, he pointed out, were realized only 
 by a wide featureless area, uniform in character and temperate 
 in climate. Such areas exist only in the great grass lands of the 
 Old "World, and the distribution of these accord with the lin- 
 guistic evidence as to the geographical range and pastoral habit 
 of the primitive Aryan, and may very likely be found to account 
 for these. Consequently he was inclined to indicate as the 
 "Aryan Home" the great plains of southeastern Europe. 
 
 Kuno's introduction of a geographical factor into the contro- 
 versy is itself characteristic of a great contemporary movement 
 in German geography, the first extension of which to criticism of 
 the philologists is the essay of J. Schmidt published in 1872,^^ 
 and the latest a paper of F. Eatzel in 1904. But this anticipates 
 
 57 Geiger, Zur EntwickelungsgescMchte der Menschheit, Stuttgart, 
 1871. 
 
 58 Kuno, ForscJiungen in GeMete der alien Volkerkunde, Berlin, 1871. 
 
 59 J. Schmidt, Die Verwandschaftsverhdltnisse der Indogerman- 
 ischen Sprachen, Weimar, 1872. 
 
€2 University of California Publications in History [Vol. 4 
 
 the order of events. It was less the geographers than the eth- 
 nologists who wrecked the patriarchal theory. 
 
 The Matriarchate in Southern India, Africa, and North America 
 
 The patriarchal theorj^ lasted barely fifty years. It had owed 
 its revival, as we have seen, to two fresh branches of research, 
 comparative jurisprudence and comparative philology, both stim- 
 ulated directly by the results of European administration in 
 northern India. It owed its decline to the results of similar 
 inquiries in other parts of the world, stimulated no less directly 
 by other phases of the great colonising movement, which marks, 
 above all other things, the century from 1760 to 1860. Here 
 again a small number of examples stand out as the crucial in- 
 stances. British administration in India had, of course, been 
 extended over the non- Aryan south, as well as over the north; 
 and in Travancore, and other parts of the Madras Presidency, 
 British commissioners found themselves confronted with types 
 of society which showed the profoundest disregard of the patri- 
 archal theory. Like the Lycians of Herodotus, these perverse 
 people "called themselves after their mothers' names": they 
 honoured their mother and neglected their father, in society, 
 and government, as well as in their homes ; their admiinistration, 
 their law, and their whole mode of life rested on the assumption 
 that it was the women, not the men, in whom reposed the con- 
 tinuity of the family and the authority to govern the state. Here 
 was a parechasis, a perverted type of society, worthy of Aristotle 
 himself. It is a type which, as a matter of fact, is widely dis- 
 tributed in southern and southeastern Asia, and had been repeat- 
 edly described by travellers from the days of Tavernier (in 
 Borneo) and Laval (before 1679 in the Maldive Islands), if not 
 earlier still. It existed also in the New "World and Lafitau had 
 already compared the Iroquois with the ancient Lycians. But it 
 was Buchanan's account of the Nairs of the Malabar Coast, pub- 
 lished in 1807,^" which came at the psychological moment, and 
 
 CO Buchanan, F., A Journey -from Madras tliroiigh the Countries 
 of Mysore, Canara, and Mala'bar, 3 vols, 1807. 
 
1916] Myres: Anthropology and Political Science 63 
 
 first attracted serious attention. At the other extremity of India, 
 also, analogous customs were being recorded, about the same 
 time, by Samuel Turner in Tibet, which might have given pause 
 at the outset to the speculators who hoped to base general con- 
 clusions on anything so special and peculiar as the customs of 
 Aryan India. 
 
 Similar evidence came pouring in during the generation 
 which followed; partly, it is true, as the result of systematic 
 search among older travelers, but mainly through the intense 
 exploitation of large parts of the world by European traders 
 and colonists. Conspicuous instances are the Negro societies of 
 western and equatorial Africa, first popularised by the republi- 
 cation of William Bosman's Guinea (1700), in Pinkerton's 
 General Collection of Voyages and Travels (London, 1808, &c.), 
 and by Proyart's Histoire de Loango (1776), which also reached 
 the English public in the same invaluable collection. But it was 
 from the south that the new African material came most copi- 
 ously, in proportion as the activity of explorers, missionaries, 
 and colonists was greater. Thunberg's account of the Bechu- 
 anas"^ takes the lead here ; but for English thought the principal 
 authorities are, of course, John Mackenzie"^ and David Liv- 
 ingstone.^^ 
 
 It was not to be expected that America, which had made such 
 remarkable contributions to the study of man in the seventeenth 
 and eighteenth centuries,^* should fall behind in the nineteenth, 
 when its vast resources of mankind, as of nature's gifts, were 
 being realised at last. Prom Hunter,^^ Gallatin,"^ and School- 
 
 61 Pinkerton, vol. xvi. 
 
 62 Jolm Mackenzie, Ten Years North of the Orange River (1859-69), 
 Edinburgh, 1871. 
 
 63 David Livingstone, Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambesi 
 and its Tributaries (1858-64), London, 1865. 
 
 Hi The harvest of the earlier period is gathered up in F. X. Charle- 
 voix, Histoire et description de la Nouvelle France, 6 vols, Paris, 
 1744; Histoire de Paraguay, 6 vols, Paris, 1756. 
 
 05 Hunter, Manners and Customs of several Indian Tribes located 
 West of the Mississippi, Philadelphia, 1823. 
 
 66 Gallatin, Archaelogia Americana, Philadelphia (from 1820 
 onwards). 
 
64 University of California Publications in History [Vol. i 
 
 craft,"^ in the twenties, to Lewis Morgan^^ in 1865, there was 
 hardly a traveller "out West" who did not bring back some 
 fresh example of society destructive of the patriarchal theory. 
 
 As often happens in such cases, more than one survey of the 
 evidence was in progress simultaneously. Bachofen was the first 
 ,to publish,'^'' and it is curious that his great book on "Mother- 
 right" appeared in the very same year as Maine's Ancient Law. 
 Lubbock's Pre-historic Times, in the next year, represents the 
 same movement of thought in England in a popular shape, but 
 almost independently. In America, Lewis Morgan, whom I have 
 noted already as an able interpreter of Iroquois custom, followed 
 up his detailed studies of Redskin law by a Smithsonian mono- 
 graph in 1871 on Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the 
 Human Family, and, in 1877, by his book on Ancient Society. 
 Meanwhile Post had published his great work on the Evolution 
 of Marriage''" in 1875, and J. F. McLennan his first Studies in 
 Ancient History in 1876. It was the generation of Darwin and 
 of the great philologists, as we have seen, and survivals were in 
 the air: Dargan^'^ pointed out traces of the matriarchate in the 
 law and custom of Germany, and Wilken'^ in those of early 
 Arabia. The period of exploration, if I may so term it, closed on 
 this aspect of the subject with Westermarck's History of Human 
 Marriage, which was published in London in 1891. 
 
 Australian Evidence: Totemism and Classificatory Kinship 
 
 I have now mentioned India, South Africa, and North 
 America, three principal fields of English-speaking enterprise 
 during the nineteenth century, and have indicated the con- 
 
 s7 Schoolcraft, Travels in the Central Portions o/ the Mississippi 
 Yalley (New York, 1825); Notes on the Iroquois (1846). 
 
 68 Lewis H. Morgan, Proc. Am. Acad. Arts and Sciences, vii, 1865-8. 
 
 «9 Bachofen, Das Mutter-recht, Stuttgart, 1861. 
 
 '0 Hermann Post, Die Geschlechtsgenossenschaft der XJrzeit und die 
 Entstehunff der Ehe, Oldenburg, 1875. 
 
 '1 Dargan, Mutter-recht und Raul)ehe und ihre Reste im German- 
 ischen Recht und Leien, Breslau, 1883. 
 
 72 Wilken, Das Matriarchat tei den alten Arabern, Leipzig, 1884. 
 
1916] Myres: Anthropology and Political Science 65 
 
 tribution of each to modern anthropology in its bearing on 
 political science. Only Australia remains; and, though Aus- 
 tralia's task has been shared more particularly with North 
 America, I shall be doing no injustice to Lewis Morgan or to 
 McLennan if I couple with their names those of Pison and 
 Howitt," as the discoverers of classical instances of societies 
 which observe neither paternal nor maternal obligations of 
 kinship as we understand them, but have adopted those 
 purely artificial systems of relationships which in moments of 
 elation we explain as totemic, or, in despair, describe as classi- 
 ficatory. 
 
 Hermann Post: Comparative Jurisprudence 
 
 Our retrospect, therefore, of the last fifty years shows clearly 
 once again how intimately European colonisation and anthro- 
 pological discoveries have gone hand in hand: first to establish 
 a matriarchal theory of society as a rival of the patriarchal; 
 and then to confront both views alike with the practices and 
 with the theory of totemism. 
 
 From the point of view of political science, all this mass of 
 inquiries finds applications already in more departments than 
 one ; though it is probably still too early to appraise its influence 
 adequately. The new Montesquieu has not yet arisen to inter- 
 pret to us the Spirit of the Laws. Most directly, perhaps, we 
 can trace such influence in the Comparative Jurisprudence of 
 Hermann Post, whose first work on the Evolution of Marriage 
 appeared, as we have seen, in 1875. Post's general attitude is 
 best seen in his Introduction to the Study of Ethnological Juris- 
 prudence, which was published in 1886, and in his African Juris- 
 prudence of 1887.'* As the result of a survey of social organ- 
 
 73 Fison and Howitt, Kamilaroi and Kurnai, Melbourne and Sydney, 
 1880. 
 
 li Hermann Post, Einleitung in das Studiiim der ethnologischen 
 Jurisprudenz (Oldenburg 1886); Afrikanische Jurisprudenz (1887). 
 His position is however already clear in his first synthetic work, 
 Der Vrsprung des Rechts, 1876, as well as in his earlier book on 
 marriage. For a good summary of Post's views see Th. Achelis, Die 
 Entwickelung der modernen EtUnologie (Berlin, 1889), p. 113-128, and 
 the same writer's Moderne Ethnologie (1896). 
 
66 University of California Publications in History [Vol. 4 
 
 isations, considered as machinery in motion, Post points out 
 very justly that it is useless to attempt to explain social phe- 
 nomena on the basis of psychological activities of individuals, 
 as is too commonly assumed, because all individuals whose con- 
 duet we can possibly observe have themselves been educated 
 in some society or other, and presume in all their social acts the 
 assumptions on which that society itself proceeds. 
 
 "I take the legal customs of all peoples of the earth," so he wrote 
 in 1884,T5 "the residual outcome of living legal consciousness of 
 humanity, for the starting-point of my inquiry into the science of law; 
 and then, on that basis, I propound the question, What is law? If by 
 this road I arrive eventually at an abstract conception of law, or at an 
 idea of law, then the whole fabric so created consists, from base to 
 summit, of flesh and blood." 
 
 It is the same method, of course, which had already yielded 
 such remarkable results to Montesquieu and even to Locke. 
 The point of view is no longer that of a Maine or a McLennan, 
 students of patriarchal or of matriarchal institutions by them- 
 selves. It is that of a spectator of human society as a whole ; 
 and such a point of view became possible at all only when it was 
 already certain that no great section of humanity remained 
 altogether unexplored, however fragmentary our knowledge 
 might still be, of much that we ought to have recorded. And its 
 immediate outcome has been to throw into the strongest possible 
 relief the dependence of the form and still more of the actual 
 •content of all human societies on something which is not in the 
 iuman mind at all, but is the infinite variety of that external 
 nature which society exists to fend off from man, and also to 
 let man dominate if he can. 
 
 This was, of course, already the standpoint of Comte, with 
 his emphasis on the monde amiiant. But Comte, the citizen of 
 a state which except in Canada had failed to colonise, and there- 
 fore had little direct contact with non-European types of society, 
 confined himself far too exclusively to European data. His 
 
 75 Post, Die Grundlagen des Rechts (1884). 
 
1916] My res: Anthropology and Political Science 67 
 
 strength is precisely where the science of France was so mag- 
 nificently strong in his day, in the domain of pure physics; it 
 is his analogies between politics and physics which are so illum- 
 inating in his work, as in that of his English compeer, Herbert 
 Spencer;''' and it is the weakness of both in the direction of 
 anthropology which mainly accounts for the shortness of their 
 respective vogues. 
 
 Friedrich Ratzel: Anthropo-geography 
 
 At the point which we have now reached in this rapid survey 
 of our science, it was obviously to geography — the systematic 
 study of those external forces of nature as an ordered whole — 
 that anthropology stretched out its hands; and it did not ask 
 in vain. But while English geography had remained explora- 
 tory, descriptive, and (like English geology) historical in its out- 
 look, the new German science of Erdkunde — "earth-knowledge" 
 in the widest sense of the word — had already come into being 
 on the basis of the labours of Ritter and the two Humboldts, and 
 under the guidance of such men as Wagner, Richthofen, and 
 Bastian; the last-named also an anthropologist of the first rank. 
 It was, thus, to a distinguished pupil of Wagner, Friedrich 
 Ratzel, that anthropology owed, more than to any other man, the 
 next forward step on these lines. In Ratzel 's mind, history and 
 geography went hand in hand as the precursors of a scientific 
 anthropology.'^ History to define when, and in what order, man 
 makes his conquests over nature ; geography to show where, and 
 within what limits, nature presents a conquerable field for man. 
 Much of this, of course, was already implicit in the teaching of 
 Adolf Bastian, whose monumental volumes on Man in History 
 had appeared at Leipzig as early as I860; his Contributions 
 to Comparative Psychology in 1868; and his Legal Relations 
 
 76 
 
 i Compare Quetelet's Essai de physique sociale (1841), as a 
 symptom of the trend of French thought at this stage. 
 
 " Ratzel, AntJiropo-geographie, Leipzig, vol. 1, 1882; ii, 1891. 
 
68 University of California Publications in History [Vol. 4 
 
 among the Different Peoples of the Earth in 1872^* — three 
 years before Post's first essay. But Bastian, inaccessible for 
 years together in Tibet or Polynesia, was rather an inspiration 
 to a few intimate colleagues than a great propagandist; and 
 besides, it was not till the appearance of his Doctrine of the 
 Geographical Provinces in 1886'" that he touched on this precise 
 ground, and by that time Ratzel's History of Man had already 
 been out for a year.^" 
 
 Polygenism and Slavery 
 
 Hitherto we have been concerned with that social or cultural 
 aspect of anthropology which deals with what men do and how 
 they order their lives; and so lies obviously on the frontiers of 
 political science. Yet one of the most striking instances of 
 interaction concerns the other half of the science of man, the 
 study, namely, of what men are in their physical breed, as mem- 
 bers of the animal kingdom. At first sight this enquiry lies 
 remote enough from polities. Yet throughout the first half of 
 the nineteenth century, and about the very cradle of physical 
 anthropology, was played a controversial comedy in which it is 
 difficult to say whether anthropology or politics did more, at 
 the moment, to misguide and deform the other. The question 
 which the anthropologist was asked to decide was this: "Is 
 there but one kind of man, or are there two or more ? ' ' The use 
 which the politician meant to make of the answer was to 
 determine the rightness or wrongness of Negro slavery. 
 
 Until the latter part of the eighteenth century, no one had 
 doubted, so far as I can discover, that Man, so far as he could 
 be regarded as animal at all, formed a single indivisible species. 
 
 78 Bastian, Der Mensch in der GescMcMe (Leipzig, 1860); Beitrage 
 zur vergleichenden Psycliologie (Berlin, 1868); Rechtsverliiiltnisse 6ei 
 verschiedenen Volkern der Erde (Berlin, 1872). 
 
 79 Bastian, Zur Lehre von den geograpMscUen Provinzen, Berlin, 
 1886. 
 
 soRatzel, Volkerkunde (Leipzig, 1885). His metUod is best studied 
 in the first volume of his Anthropo-geograph le (Leipzig, 1882). 
 
1916] Myres: Anthropology and Political Science 69 
 
 The anthropologies of Greece and Egypt had rested on the 
 rough generalization (which was in fact true for the original 
 field of observation round the Mediterranean Sea), that well- 
 marked types of complexion, red, yellow, white, and black, were 
 characteristic of accepted geographical regions, Egypt, Asia, 
 Europe, and Africa. Such, too, was the first modern grouping 
 suggested by F. Bernier in 1672; and such in essentials were 
 those of Buffon in 1749, and Linnaeus in 1755. Linnaeus 
 indeed had been much impressed by "Wild Peter", as we have 
 seen, and had included Homo ferus in his System of Nature, 
 out of sheer excess of precaution. Buffon never seems quite to 
 have made up his mind whether there were wild men or no. 
 But this was beside the point. The slave-owning eighteenth cen- 
 tury knew quite well that Negroes and Chinamen were no more 
 Homo ferus than they were chimpanzees, and justified enslave- 
 ment as Aristotle had justified it of old, on the ground that, if 
 anything, it was to the advantage of the slave. Even Blumen- 
 bach's discoveries in the comparative anatomy of the skull did 
 not seriously disturb the old regional interpretation of human 
 varieties; and as long as these types were regarded as regional 
 phenomena, they were not unnaturally regarded as due to 
 regional influences. Blumenbach himself, for example, regarded 
 man as naturally white-skinned, and followed Greek precedent 
 in attributing the blackness and yellowness of Africans and 
 Asiatics to the effects of solar heat. He was forced, however, 
 by his comparative method to regard the Negro skull as mor- 
 phologically nearer than the Caucasian to the skulls of the great 
 apes. On the other hand, the excessive variability of his Ameri- 
 can skulls, and (later) the marked similarity between his Malay 
 and his Mongoloid material, led him to qualify the regional 
 scheme with which he started; and prepared the way for the 
 zoological, and more especially anatomical, work of the next 
 generation. 
 
 But it was no accident that the generation which first 
 doubted, on the political side, the legitimacy of white man's 
 ownership of black man, and translated those doubts into prac- 
 
70 University of California Publications in History [Vol. 4 
 
 tice and acts of Parliament, was precisely the generation which 
 first doubted on the theoretic side, whether white man and black 
 man were of the same blood. The explanation is simple and the 
 sequel instructive. As long as slavery was regarded as justi- 
 fiable morally, no one troubled himself to justify it anthropolo- 
 gically. But no sooner was the naturalness of slavery called in 
 question by the Abolitionists — under the influence of Rousseau's 
 following, and the "Declaration of the Eights of Man" — 
 than the slave-owners raised the previous question : ' ' Granted 
 that I am my brother 's keeper, and granted that this means that 
 I may not be his master, yet is this man, this black brother, 
 in any true sense my brother at all? Is he not, on the face of 
 him, only an exceptionally domesticable animal, and of different 
 lineage from mine ? ' ' 
 
 The first important treatise was Sommering's Memoir e sur 
 les Negres, in 1785, a perfectly honest piece of scientific work. 
 It was reinforced in 1791 by Camper's study of the anatomy 
 of face and jaw, and by White's work, in 1795, on the forearm. 
 The latter was just too late to influence Buffon in the revised 
 classification which he thought it time to publish in that year; 
 but it influenced profoundly both Prichard and Lawrence in 
 England, and Cuvier and Geoffrey de St. Hilaire abroad. 
 Clearly if man began his career as a single type, he had been 
 diablement change en route. But had there been time for such 
 changes to occur? Purely extraneous considerations, some 
 derived from ancient literature, some from chronological 
 researches in the seventeenth century, and all alike unchecked 
 as yet by the infant science of geology, prevailed to throw 
 anthropologists, and indeed all zoologists alike, into opposing 
 camps. For there is nothing like an error of fact to promote 
 divergence of theory. 
 
 Lamarck, followed by Geoffrey de St. Hilaire, and in Eng- 
 land by Prichard and Latham, was prepared to contend (1) 
 that a natural species not only could spread into different 
 regions within the accepted limits of time, but also could give 
 rise to strongly marked varieties suited to each of these regions. 
 
1916] My res: Anthropology and Political Science 71 
 
 through inheritance of acquired variations; (2) that if eventu- 
 ally the process of differentiation should be found to be slower 
 than anthropologists at present supposed, they must neverthe- 
 less hold tight to the idea of development, and go back to the 
 Archbishop for more time. Cuvier, at the other extreme, 
 impressed by the persistence of specific differences, and by the 
 weight of the authority which imposed the brief time-limit, 
 assumed, rather than argued, an original multiplicity of types. 
 In the special instance of man, the question was complicated 
 further, and not least for the followers of Cuvier, by the cir- 
 cumstance that the same authorities which placed Creation so 
 late, appeared to assign a single origin to all forms of man. 
 Attempts had indeed been made intermittently from the seven- 
 teenth century onward, to dissociate from the family of Adam 
 the remoter and ruder races which travellers were discovering; 
 but in 1800 most people still accepted the tradition of a single 
 origin, and explained the blackness of the Negro by the "curse 
 of Cain." Cuvier himself, somewhat inconsistently, followed 
 the orthodox view on this point also. All mankind, for him, 
 was of one species, and the differences between Caucasian and 
 Negro were racial only. Prichard and most of the English- 
 men took the same view, and devoted themselves to the enquiry, 
 how, when, and why this single human species had become dif- 
 ferentiated regionally. 
 
 Many Lamarckian anthropologists on the other hand, hold- 
 ing at the same time that species were mutable, that different 
 types of men showed specific differences, and that the geo- 
 graphical barriers to wholesale migration were insuperable, 
 found it easier to derive the white man and the negro, within 
 their respective regional limits, Europe and Africa, from dif- 
 ferent species of apes, than to derive white and black man 
 from a common human ancestor. In France the leader of this 
 "polygenist" school was Virey, whose Histoire nafnrelle du 
 genre humaine appeared in 1801. Its influence in England is 
 apparent from Lawrence's Lectures on the Natural History of 
 Man, which came out in 1817. 
 
72 University of California Publications in History [yoi.. i 
 
 On the continent of Europe, as will be apparent from the 
 dates given above, this zoological controversy coincided almost 
 exactly in time with the new philological movement of which I 
 have already tried to show the significance. The contribution 
 of philology to the discussion was unfortunate. It is concisely 
 expressed in Schlegel's qiiot linguae, tot gentes; and this gross 
 fallacy of the equivalence of speech and breed, dominated con- 
 tinental thought on this subject for half a century, reinforcing 
 the sentiment of nationality in public affairs, and (in this special 
 question) working wholly in favour of the polygenists. 
 
 In England, quite different considerations were at work. 
 French political axioms, as to the rights of man, of which I have 
 already traced brieflj' the anthropological ancestry, operated in 
 England to produce not liberty nor equality, but fraternity; 
 not a revolution among the whites, but emancipation for their 
 black brethren. And inasmuch as the ease for abolition rested 
 on the sole consideration that all races of men were in some 
 unqualified sense of one blood, it was clear that the proof or 
 disproof of single origin for black and for white had the most 
 direct bearing upon morals and practical politics. Two conse- 
 quences can be traced. In England, the cradle of emancipation, 
 polygenist views could hardly get a hearing. As late as 184S 
 Dr. Prichard, the leading representative of the unitary view, 
 admitted frankly that "if these [polygenist] opinions are not 
 every day expressed in this country, it is because the avowal of 
 them is restrained by a degree of odium that would be excited 
 by it."'^ In America, where slavery was still practised, and 
 supported by vast material interests, all anthropology which 
 assumed or defended the brotherhood of man was discounted as 
 a concession to sentiment or dogma. Those who would appre- 
 ciate the new bent given to anthropological study in America 
 are referred to the introduction to Nott and Gliddon's Types 
 
 81 J. C. Prichard, Natural History of Man, London, 1848, p. 6. 
 Prlcliard himself had had to give up the TJssherian chronology to save 
 the unity of species: to such trials of fortitude were the learned 
 exposed in the middle of the nineteenth century. 
 
1916] Myres: Anthropology and Political Science 73 
 
 of Mankind.^- Here it is set forth as the province of ethnology 
 to investigate no less "what position in the social scale Provi- 
 dence has assigned to each type of man," than "the primitive 
 organic structure" or "how far a race may have been, or may 
 become, modified by the combined action of time and moral and 
 physical causes." The meaning of this last phrase becomes 
 clearer on the next page, where it is stated that 
 
 the grand problem, more particularly interesting to all readers, is 
 that which involves the common origin of races; for upon the latter 
 deduction hang not only certain religious dogmas, but the more 
 practical question of the equality and perfectibility of races; we 
 say 'more practical question,' because while Almighty Power, on the 
 one hand, is not responsible to Man for the distinct origin of human 
 races, these, on the other, are accountable to Him for the manner 
 in which their delegated power is used toward each other. 
 
 The writers go on to narrate a very curious episode, when Mr. 
 Secretary Calhoun, in the course of diplomatic correspondence 
 with France and England about the proposed annexation of 
 Texas to the United States, called Mr. Gliddon, and through 
 him Dr. S. G. Morton of Philadelphia^^ into consultation, and 
 having ' ' soon perceived that the conclusions which he had drawn 
 long before from history, and from his personal observations in 
 America . . . were entirely corroborated by the plain teach- 
 ings of modern science, ' ' he concluded that it behoved the states- 
 man to lay aside all current speculations about the origin and 
 perfectibility of races, and to deal, in political argument, with 
 the simple facts as they stand. The upshot was a strongly- 
 worded despatch from Washington to the American Ambassador 
 to France; and although the English press, "which was then 
 unanimously unitary", complained anxiously that Mr. Calhoun 
 had introduced ethnology into diplomatic correspondence, a com- 
 
 82 Published in Philadelphia in 1854, and already in its seventh 
 edition in 1857. The title itself is instructive. 
 
 83 Dr. Morton was the distinguished author of the Crania 2Bgypt- 
 iaca published in 1844; where the conclusion is maintained that "the 
 organic characters which distinguish the several races of men are as 
 old as the oldest record of our species." It was indeed to determine 
 this point that he turned his attention to Egyptian material at all. 
 
74 University of California Publications in History [Vol. 4 
 
 munication from the Foreign Office promptly assured our gov- 
 ernment that Great Britain had no intention of intermeddling 
 with the domestic institutions of other nations. 
 
 Less than half a generation later the tables were completely 
 turned. The Ethnological Society of London, which had been 
 founded during the period of nationalist aspiration — quot 
 linguae tot gentes — which culminated in 1848, found itself in 
 such complete and cordial agreement with the polygenist propa- 
 ganda, that when the American crisis became acute the Unitary 
 party seceded, and formed an Anthropological Society, which 
 pursued a not wholly friendly rivalry with the Ethnological. 
 
 It took more than two generations, as will be seen from the 
 dates, to settle this momentous question : and then, as so fre- 
 quently happens in the human sciences, the question was not 
 really settled but superseded. The recognition of Boucher de 
 Perthes' discovery, by the English mission of 1858, the appear- 
 ance of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859, on the scientific 
 side, and the issue of the American Civil War on the political, 
 shelved the whole problem : and in 1870, three years before the 
 publication of the Descent of Man, the Ethnological and the 
 Anthropological Societies buried the hatchet, and became 
 merged in the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and 
 Ireland. 
 
 Epilogue 
 
 These examples, I think, are sufficient to show how intimately 
 the growth of political philosophy has interlocked at every stage 
 with that of anthropological science. Each fresh start on the 
 never-ending quest of Man as he ought to he has been the re- 
 sponse of theory to fresh facts about Man as he is. And, mean- 
 while, the dreams and speculations of one thinker after another 
 — even dreams and speculations which have moved nations and 
 precipitated revolutions — have ceased to command men's reason, 
 when they ceased to accord with their knowledge. 
 
 And we have seen more than this. We have seen the very 
 questions which philosophers have asked, the very questions 
 
1916] Myres: Anthropology and Political Science 75 
 
 which perplexed them, no less than the solutions which they pro- 
 posed, melt away and vanish, as proilems, when the perspective 
 of anthropology shifted and the standpoint of observation 
 advanced. This is no new experience; nor is it peculiar either 
 to anthropology among the natural sciences, or to political science 
 among the aspects of the study of man. It is the common law 
 of the mind's growth, which all science manifests, and all 
 philosophy. 
 
 And now I would make one more attempt to put on parallel 
 lines the course of political thinking. It is not so very long ago 
 that a great British administrator, returning from one of the 
 gravest trials of statesmanship which our generation has seen, to 
 meet old colleagues and classmates at a college festival, gave it to 
 us as the need he had most felt, in the pauses of his administra- 
 tion, that there did not exist at present any adequate formulation 
 of the great outstanding features of our knowledge (as distinct 
 from our creeds) about human societies and their mode of 
 growth, and he commended it to the new generation of scholar- 
 ship, as its highest and most necessary task, to face once more the 
 question: What are the forces, as far as we can know them 
 now, which, as Aristotle would have put it, maintain or destroy 
 states 1 
 
 But if a young student' of political science were to set him- 
 self to this life-work, where could he turn for his facts ? "What 
 proportion of the knowable things about the human societies 
 with which travellers' tales and the atlases acquaint him could 
 he possibly bring into his survey, without a lifetime of personal 
 research in every quarter of our planet? I have in mind one 
 such student setting out to investigate, on the lines of modern 
 anthropology, the nature of authority and the circumstances of 
 its rise among primitive men; and the difficulty at the outset 
 is precisely as I have described. In the case of the "black fel- 
 lows" of Australia such a student depends upon the works of 
 some four or five men, representing (at a favourable estimate) 
 one-twentieth even of the known tribes of the accessible parts 
 of that continent. For British South Africa he would be hardly 
 
76 University of Calif or iiia PuMications in History [Vol. 4 
 
 better served; for British North America, outside the ground 
 covered in British Columbia by Boas and Hill-Tout, he would 
 have almost the field to himself ; and the prospect would seem to 
 him the drearier and the more hopeless when he compared it 
 with things on the other side of the forty-ninth parallel. 
 
 [The reader is reminded at this point that this essay was 
 originally designed to be read at a meeting in Winnipeg; and 
 that these concluding paragraphs were of immediate applica- 
 tion then. In part the circumstances which suggested them 
 have been most happily changed by the establishment of a 
 Department of Ethnology at Ottawa, and the early publica- 
 tions of that department, under the general editorship of the 
 geological survey of Canada, promise well for the fulfillment 
 of its design. 
 
 But the other practical suggestion, of a systematic record 
 of the ancestry and physique of newcomers into the states 
 of the New World, still remains unrealized; and meanwhile 
 the generation is dying out, which alone has the most vital 
 data in its memory. As long as this great scientific view 
 is not met, I cannot as historian or as anthropologist regard 
 what I then wrote as obsolete. It was addressed then to 
 fellow-citizens in Canada; but science knows no frontiers, and 
 I leave the words as they stand, for friends and colleagues in 
 California. They too know the need, and as occasion serves, 
 they will play their part to meet it.] 
 
 Now, our neighbors south of that line have the rep^itation 
 of being practical men; in other departments of knowledge 
 they are believed to know well what pays. And I am forced 
 to believe that it is because they know that it pays, to know 
 all that can still be known about the forms of human society 
 which are protected and supervised from Washington, that they 
 have gone so far as they have towards rescuing that knowledge 
 
1916] Myres: Anthropology and Political Science 77 
 
 from extinction while still there is time. The Bureau of 
 Ethnology of the United States of America is the most sys- 
 tematic, the most copious, and, I think, taking it all in all, 
 the most scientific of the public agencies for the study of any 
 group of men, as men. The only other which can be com- 
 pared with it is the ethnographical section of the Census of 
 India, and that was an effort to meet, against time, an emer- 
 gency long predicted, but only suddenly foreseen by the men 
 who were responsible for giving the order. Thus, humanly 
 speaking, it is now not improbable that in one great newly- 
 settled area of the world every tribe of natives, which now 
 continues to inhabit it, may at least be explored, and in some 
 cases really surveyed, before it has time to disappear. But 
 observe, this applies only to the tribes which now continue 
 to exist; and what a miserable fraction they are of what has 
 already perished irrevocably! It is no use crying over spilt 
 milk, as I said to begin with; the only sane course is to be 
 doubly careful of whatever remains in the jug. 
 
 An Ethnological Survey for Canada 
 
 And now I conclude with a piece of recent history, which 
 will point its own moral. When the British Association met 
 first outside the British Isles, it celebrated its meeting at 
 Montreal by instituting, for the first time, a section for an- 
 thropology; and it placed in the chair of that section one of 
 the principal founders of modern scientific anthropology. Dr. 
 Edward Burnett Tylor, then recently installed at Oxford, 
 and still the revered professor of our science there. Through 
 his influence mainly, but with the active goodwill of the lead- 
 ing names in other sciences in Canada, a research committee 
 was formed to investigate the northwest tribes of the Domin- 
 ion; and for eleven consecutive years expeditions wholly or 
 partly maintained by this Association were sent to several dis- 
 tricts of British Columbia. These expeditions cost the Asso- 
 ciation about £1,200 in all. I am glad to think that the chief 
 
78 University of California Publications in History [Vol.4 
 
 representative of this committee's work, Dr. Franz Boas, has 
 long since realised, in his great contributions to knowledge, 
 the high hopes which his early reports inspired. 
 
 When the Association met the second time on Canadian soil, 
 at Toronto, the occasion seemed opportune for a fresh step. 
 Dr. Boas had already undertaken work on a larger scale and 
 under other auspices. But it was thought likely that if a 
 fresh committee of the Association were appointed, with wider 
 terms of reference and further grants, it would be possible to 
 select and to train a small staff of Canadian observers, and by 
 their means to produce such a series of preliminary reports on 
 typical problems of Canadian anthropology as would satisfy 
 the Dominion Government that the need for a thorough sys- 
 tematic survey was a real one, and that such a survey would 
 be practicable with the means and the men which Canada itself 
 could supply. Among the leading members of this Ethno- 
 graphic Survey Committee I need only mention three — the late 
 Dr. George Dawson, Mr. David Boyle, and Mr. Benjamin Suite, 
 each eminent already in his own line of study, and all con- 
 vinced of the great scientific value of what was proposed. The 
 first year's enterprise opened well; workers were found in 
 several districts of Canada; the Association sent out scientific 
 instruments, and formed in London a strong consultative com- 
 mittee to keep the Canadian field-workers in touch with Eu- 
 ropean students of the subject. But the premature death of 
 George Dawson in 1901 broke the mainspring of the machine; 
 the field-workers fell out of touch with one another and with 
 the subject; the instruments were scattered, and in 1904 the 
 Ethnographic Survey Committee was not recommended for 
 renewal. 
 
 I need not say how great a disappointment this failure 
 was to those of us who believe that in this department of 
 knowledge Canada has great contributions to make, and who 
 know that if this contribution to knowledge is not made within 
 the next ten years, it can never be made at all. I am not speak- 
 ing merely of the urgency of exact study of the Indian peoples. 
 
1916 J Myres: Anthropology and Political Science 79 
 
 This indeed is obvious and urgent enough; and the magnificent 
 results of organized effort in the United States are there to 
 show how much can still be rescued. But at the moment I 
 appeal rather for the systematic study of your own European 
 immigrants, that stream of almost all known varieties of white 
 men with which you are drenching yearly fresh regions of the 
 earth's surface, which if they have had experience of human 
 settlements at all, have known man only as a predatory migra- 
 tory animal, more restless than the bison, more feckless and 
 destructive than the wolf. Of your immigrants' dealings with 
 wild nature, you are indeed keeping rough undesigned record 
 in the documents of your Land Surveys, and in the statistics 
 of the spread of agriculture over what once was forest or 
 prairie ; and in time to come, something — though not, I fear, 
 much — will exist to show what good (and as likely as not, also, 
 what irremediable harm) this age of colonisation has done to 
 the region as a whole. But what you do not keep record of 
 is Nature's dealings with your immigrants; you do not know 
 — and as long as you omit to oiserve, you are condemned not 
 to know — the answer to the simple all-important question, 
 What kinds of men do best in Canada? What kind of men is 
 Canada making out of the raw material which Europe is feed- 
 ing into God's mills on this side? 
 
 Over in England, we are only too well aware how poor a 
 lead we have given you. We, too, for a century now, have 
 been feeding into other great winnowing chambers the raw 
 crop of our villagers. "We have created (to change the meta- 
 phor), in our vast towns, great vats of fermenting humanity, 
 under conditions of life which at the best are unprecedented, 
 and at their worst almost unimaginable. That is our great 
 experiment in modern English anthropology. We are beginning 
 to know, in the first place, what types of human animal can 
 tolerate and survive the stern conditions of modern urban 
 life. We are learning, still more slowly, what modes of life, 
 what modified structure of the family, of the daily round 
 of society at large, can offer the adjustment to new needs of 
 
80 University of California Publications in History [Vol. 4 
 
 life, which human nature demands under this new, almost un- 
 bearable strain. We are seeing, more clear in the mass, even 
 if hopelessly involved in detail, the same process of selection 
 going on in the mental furniture of the individuals themselves ; 
 new views of life, new beliefs, new motives and modes of action ; 
 new, if only in the sense that they presuppose the destruction 
 of the old. 
 
 That is our problem in human society at home. And yours, 
 though it has a brighter side, is in its essentials the same. 
 Geographers can tell you something already of the physical 
 "control" which is the setting to all possible societies on 
 Canadian soil. Scientific study of the vanishing remnants of 
 the Eedskin tribes may show you a little of the effects of this 
 control, long continued, upon nations whom old Heylin held to 
 be "doubtless the offspring of the Tartars." Sympathetic 
 observation and friendly intercourse may still fill some blanks 
 in our knowledge of their social state; how hunting or fishing 
 — or, in rare cases, agriculture — forms and reforms men's man- 
 ners and their institutions when it is the dominant interest 
 in their lives. But what climate and economic habit have 
 done in the past with the Redskins, the same climate and other 
 economic habits are as surely doing with ourselves. In the 
 struggle with Nature, as in the struggle with other men, it is 
 the weakest who go to the wall; it is the fittest who survive. 
 And it is our business to know, and to record for those who 
 come after us, what manner of men we were, when we came; 
 whence we were drawn, and how we are distributed in this 
 new land. An Imperial Bureau of Ethnology, which shall 
 take for its study all citizens of our State, as such, is a dream 
 which has filled great minds in the past and may some day 
 find realisation. A Canadian Bureau is at the same time a 
 nearer object, and a scheme of more practicable size. In the 
 course of this meeting, information and proposals for such a 
 Bureau of Ethnology are to be laid before this section by more 
 competent authorities than I. My task has only been to show, 
 in a preliminary way, what our science has done in the past. 
 
1916] My res: Anthropology and Political Science 81 
 
 to stimulate political philosophy, and to determine its course 
 and the order of its discoveries. 
 
 "Some men are borne," said Edward Grimstone just three 
 centuries ago, "so farre in love with themselves, as they es- 
 teeme nothing else, and think that whatsoever fortune hath 
 set without the compasse of their power and government 
 should also be banished from their knowledge. Some others, 
 a little more carefuU; who finding themselves engaged by their 
 birth, or abroad, to some one place, strive to understand how 
 matters pass there, and remaine so tied to the consideration of 
 their owne Commonweale, as they affect nothing else, carrying 
 themselves as parties of that imperfect bodie, whereas in their 
 curiositie they should behave themselves as members of this 
 world." It is as "members of this world," I hope, that we 
 meet together to-day.