that when power is hereditary, it usually descends to successors according to the same rules as property.

It was from

With these facts before us, it seems to me clear enough what must have been the origin of hereditary government. The nearest approach to what we call government (as distinguished from mere division of labour) which occurs among the lower animals is where one species of higher powers enslaves another of lower powers, as happens among the different kinds of ants. It seems to me that the origin of hereditary government among men must have been similar. The history of the human race is a history of incessant wars between the contiguous groups, and it seems plain that from very early times man had been. one of the slave-making animals. The members of the first group of men who had intelligence enough not to exterminate the group which they had overcome, but to make slaves of its surviving members, made the first subjects and were the first hereditary governors. this small beginning that it seems to me likely that all government had grown. Such a conquering group would naturally be at the outset stronger and more intelligent than its neighbours, and it would gain additional strength by its conquest, for it would gain servants to whom it could leave servile work, and so leave itself free to attend to the more important art of war. The servile class, being naturally the weaker, would prefer its safe if subordinate position, and a composite group which would tend to keep united, would thus be formed, better organized for further progress. With the views which the primitive men had as to right or wrong, which never extended beyond the tribe, it would be perfectly impossible for anything else to happen than that a tribe thus becoming stronger should go on and conquer as many more of its weaker neighbours as it possibly could. The tribe in which the conquering and enslaving or governing habit was best developed would thus become the strongest and found a nation.

The stronger of the primitive groups would thus change from being homogeneous and would form themselves into tribes, composed of two elements-the free and the slave-and the division into ranks would be begun. At the same time would begin the division which assigns hereditary powers and occupations to each rank or caste. But before this division was complete, and before nobles and commoners formed well recognized classes, a step would intervene-namely, the development of the hereditary chief-and to this end various causes would operate. In early times, the existence of very large groups is impossible, owing to the difficulty of obtaining subsistence. When a composite group of slaves and their masters subdivided, the division would be made by the group falling into as many parts as there were families among the masters, and each would take with them the slave families that were most specially attached to them. What was originally common property would become individual property, and the second set of composite groups thus resulting would again tend to endure, for the arrangement would he benefit for the members of the lower race, as they

would have for their guidance a family of the highest available talent. This division would in a short time become a mere division of rank, and the head of the higher family would become (in the simplest way) the hereditary chief. This is no imaginary process, for except in some such way as this it is impossible to account for such states of society as are found in New Guinea, where tribes of Papuans exist, cach with its chief and chief's family of Malay extraction, and for the cases already mentioned as having been so often noticed in Africa, of the chief's family being of lighter colour than the rest of the tribe. These higher families keep up as long as they can their purity of blood, and they do so in the same way as royal and noble families amongst ourselves do-namely, by avoiding intermarriage with their inferiors, and marrying only in their own class, even though they have to seek beyond the group for their mates.

The hereditary leadership and division of classes being once established, many things tend to keep it in force. We are familiar with many examples of what I might call the deification of the hereditary principle. In all ages and in all countries, and among the most different races, examples of the same thing have been seen. Not only the office of chief ruler, but every office and function in the State has become hereditary. The judgeships, the priesthood, the soldiery, and indeed every imaginable office in the State, from the highest to the meanest, have been held by hereditary right. In the same way every trade has been exercised by castes, the members of which could not leave it under pain of loss of social position. There must have been some reason for all this, and I can only imagine it to be this-that those who had acquired their positions by conquest and whose sons held their position by no other holding than that they were the descendants of the conquerors, could not lay too much stress on the excellence of the principle to which they owed everything. The hereditary holding of a particular function would in time be accompanied by a hereditary fitness for the office, and thus the hereditary tie would be strengthened. That the opposite course has not been followed, and that the hereditary office has not been the result of the hereditary fitness, is plain enough from what happens now, as we find that wherever free choice of profession is allowed hereditary trades disappear.

Assuming that the causes I have been discussing are sufficient to account for tribes with hereditary chiefs, the next thing is to account for the hereditary nobility. It is easy to see how, without any departure from conditions which are to be seen anywhere at the present day, this could occur. It might happen in two ways. The tribe might live long together, till the difference between chief and followers was almost blotted out, and the tradition had come into existence that they were all of one blood. If the tribe were then to make another conquest of some weaker tribe, the arrangement would be complete, and we should have the three elements out of which kings, nobles, and commoners could be developed. In another and even more probable way it might also happen. The original

tribe which made the first conquests being spread as families of chiefs over the conquered tribes would nevertheless retain some cohesion, and in emergencies would act in common. This they would do at first, as matter of convenience, under the leadership of the chief who was able to bring the most men to the field, and their interest to uphold hereditary right would tend to make his lead hereditary. Thus the most powerful chief would come to be king, and the less powerful would take the position of nobles. It was by a process such as this that many kingdoms have been consolidated, and a very recent example of the kind is to be found in the succession of events which raised the Dukes of Brandenburg to the Emperorship of Germany.

It has been objected to the view which makes conquest the origin of hereditary nobility, that it can be proved that the conquering nations have always brought the distinction with them. Of historic times this is true, and we can only get at the pre-historic stages by inference. Incessant wars and conquests went on for long before history opened. Races were superimposed over races; then lived in one community till blood distinctions were almost lost; and then conquered other nations. This went on so long, and gave rise to such complicated divisions of classes, that among some peoples there were at the opening of the historic era not merely three but somewhere about six classes. That all these divisions had the same origin as the simple division between free man and slave cannot, I think, be doubted when we find that the distinctions have many analogies, and that there is no other way which accounts for them so easily and naturally. I have already pointed out the similarity in the mode of address in old times between freeman and noble as pointing to the distinction being a survival of the distinction between slave and freeman, and I need not repeat what I have said on that point. I shall only here draw attention to another instance of late survival of the original difference, in the fact that in Russia the nobility (alone of all the free classes) had the power of owning serfs.

The theory which ascribes the origin of the nobility to the nomination of the king is founded on facts of recent date, and it is now well recognized that although nominations by the king have done much to keep up the numbers of the nobility, they were not its origin. The nobility existed long before this practice began, and the nobility by blood have always had their opinion of the nobility by nomination. The practice began when social causes made it desirable to exaggerate the kingly power, and then the idea began to prevail that the king could make a peer or peeress of anybody, from his butler or mistress up to those who had done the State some service. While this practice on the whole strengthened the nobility during the first period of its use, it is not the origin of the nobility, but is truly one of the things which in the end tends to weaken its position, for it tends to efface the original difference of blood between them and the rest of the people, and thus tends to remove the distinction of intellectual superiority. It is, however, to fact of the nobility having once belonged to a stronger race that it

seems to me to be clear that they owe their original superiority, and that they have in most countries so long retained it. That a nobility sometimes degenerates is true enough, but even in its degeneracy it is often not difficult to see traces of its original superiority, and in the case of a nobility which has not degenerated, even those who are without its pale readily admire the strength of intellect, the refinement of taste, the courage, honour, and power of command in field or cabinet, which so large a proportion of its numbers exhibit. The superiority of the nobility becomes, however, an anachronism when the fusion with other classes of the community has become so great that the signs of the original superiority have disappeared. When this happens their privileges are either lost in a revolution, or are peacefully allowed to die out in constitutionalism.

If it be held that the conflicts between the higher and lower races of men in the pre-historic times are sufficient to explain the evolution of hereditary chiefs and of nobles, all the other stages of the government combinations are matters falling within the historic period. Nations are federations of tribes, under the lead of the strongest, whose chief becomes king or emperor as the case may be, and whose power is usually gained by conquest and upheld by force. As the nation consolidates there may be an assembly of nobles with more or less power, and, as it further consolidates, there may also be an assembly of the representatives of the lower races whose members at first were considered as having no rights. In the course of this consolidation, what is called the feudal stage is passed through. In it, the land held by right of conquest, is supposed to belong to the king or nobles; the division of race is harshly marked; and every effort is made by force and law to maintain it. But all these things belong to the historic era and to constitutional histories. I have done all I wished to do if I have shown their beginnings in pre-historic times.

But

It is true that the theory which I have thus endeavoured to explain traces the beginning of government to a very humble origin, and indeed to nothing more than the exercise, in primitive times, of a power which man possesses in common with some of the lower animals. I leave it to the reader to judge, whether the theory which traces all governments to developments from hereditary government, and which finds the origin of the latter in the institution of slavery, has not more evidence in its favour than any other theory. It is not so artificial as that theory which sees the origin of government in some elective form existing in primitive times, or so imaginative as that which supposes all governments to have been framed upon the family model; but not to mention minor things-it alone explains why obedience is so thoroughly of the essence of all hereditary governments that even the freest of them are carried on under the guise of military despotisms, and why all elective governments are such mere transparent imitations of the hereditary.

J. DOVE WILSON.

"MARRIED WOMEN IN FACTORIES."

A REPLY.

[This article was already in type when the deplorable news of Professor Jevons's sudden death reached its author. A first impulse was to immediately endeavour to withdraw it, or at all events to postpone its appearance, and in the meantime to greatly modify its form. A better consideration and a re-perusal of the article removed, however, a feeling inspired rather by the shock of so melancholy a catastrophe than by anything present in the text. The author is convinced that that earnest thinker would have been the last to approve of such a course in another's case, and that it is not, therefore, fitting in his own. He is unconscious of anything approaching disrespect, or calculated to cause pain to others, in the criticisms offered. Those criticisms of some of Mr. Jevons's later enunciations are undoubtedly conceived in a free spirit, for they were written in the hope and expectation of a rejoinder-an expectation now, alas! never to be fulfilled. In such a spirit the author believes that Mr. Jevons would, of all men, have desired them to have been made, and in such a spirit to be met. The article, therefore, with some trifling verbal exceptions, appears as it was written ere the melancholy event occurred which we all mourn.]

SOME

(OME months ago (January, 1882), there was published in this REVIEW an article by Mr. W. Stanley Jevons, under the above title. Mr. Jevons, it appeared, had been engaged about that time in preparing a small treatise, "The State in Relation to Labour,” and whilst doing so his attention had been "strongly called anew to the importance of the question of the employment of married women in factories and workshops." The result of the renewed attention thus bestowed by him upon this subject was the promulgation of some very startling views and recommendations pertaining to it, which, while they did not pass quite unchallenged at the time, have scarcely yet met with the exposure and condemnation that I believe to be their due. Mr. Jevons's book is now published, and as it reveals him still impenitent, the occasion seems opportune to re-open this matter in the pages where he first brought it prominently to the front again after having slumbered for a while in a much-desired oblivion.

The first objection that I have to make against that very singular article is, that it was wrongly named. It was not exclusively with married women in factories, or factories and workshops, that it dealt at all, but with all potential mothers, married or unmarried, employed therein. Mr. Jevons's own expression is "child-bearing women," and his contention was, that all such, engaged in the above forms of productive enterprise, should be visited with exceptional disqualifications and disabilities, to be inflicted on account of " the infinite, irreparable wrong to helpless children which is involved in the mothers' employment at the mills."

This contention, it is clear, involves at least two propositions: first,