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TRADITION
PRINCIPALLY WITH REFERENCE TO
MYTHOLOGY AND THE LAW OF NATIONS.

PRINTED BY BALLANTYNE AND COMPANY
EDINBURGH AND LONDON

TRADITION

PRINCIPALLY WITH REFERENCE TO

MYTHOLOGY AND THE LAW OF
NATIONS.

BY

LORD ARUNDELL OF WARDOUR.

LONDON:
BURNS, OATES, & COMPANY,
17 & 18 PORTMAN STREET, AND 63 PATERNOSTER ROW.
1872.

CONTENTS.

PREFACE.

I shall have no hope of conveying to the reader, within the narrow limits of a preface, any fuller idea of the purport of this work than its title expresses; and as the chapters are necessarily interdependent, I can indicate no short-cut in the perusal by which this information can be obtained.

I venture to think that those who are interested in the special matters referred to will find something in these pages which may attract on account of its novelty—and some other things, new at least in their application—e.g. the comparison of Boulanger’s theory with the narratives of Captain R. Burton and Catlin.

The frequent introduction and the length of the notes, must, I am aware, give to these pages a repellent aspect, but the necessity of bringing various points under comparison has compelled this arrangement; and I regret to say that the argument runs through the whole, and that almost as much matter requiring consideration will be found in the notes and appendices as in the text.

I trust that these imperfections may not be so great as to estrange the few, among whom only I can hope to find much sympathy, who wish to see the true foundations of peace and order re-established in the world, and who may therefore to some extent be indulgent towards efforts which have for their aim and motive the attempt to erect barriers which would render the recurrence of the evils which have lately deluged mankind difficult, if not impossible.

There are others whom the recent scenes of horror have inspired with a love of peace and order, or of whom it would be more true to say, that the horrors of the late war and revolution have deepened in them the sentiment of peace and order which they have always entertained, but who still do not desire these things on the conditions upon which alone they can be secured. From them I can only ask such passing examination as may be demanded for the conscientious rejection of the evidence I have collected, or for its adjustment with more accepted theories.

There will remain for me much ground in common with all who retain their faith in the inspiration of Holy Writ, and who wish to see its authority sustained against the aggressive infidelity of the day; and even among those who reject the authority of divine revelation, there may be still some who are wearied in the arid wastes, and who would gladly retrace their steps to the green pastures and the abundant streams. Among such I may perhaps expect to find friendly criticism.

At the same time, I do not disguise from myself that, in its present mood, the world is much more anxious to be cut adrift from tradition than to be held to its moorings; and that it will impatiently learn that fresh facts have to be considered before its emancipation can be declared, or before it can be let loose without the evident certainty of shipwreck. Although the exigencies of the argument have compelled research over a somewhat extended field of inquiry, the exploration has no pretensions to being exhaustive, but at most suggestive; not attempting to work the mine, or, except incidentally, to produce the ore, but only indicating the positions in which it is likely to be found.

In the main position of the mythological chapters, that the heroes of mythological legend embody the reminiscences of the characters and incidents of the biblical narrative, I do nothing more than carry on a tradition, as the reader will see in my references to Calmet, Bryant, Palmer, and others.[1] I should add, that I limit the full application of De Maistre’s theory to the times preceding the coming of our Lord.

My attention was first drawn to the coincidences of mythology with scriptural history by the late Colonel G. Macdonell.[2] Colonel Macdonell’s coincidences were founded upon a peculiar theory of his own, and must necessarily have been exclusively upon the lines of Hebrew derivation. There is nothing, however, in these pages drawn from that source. I may add, for the satisfaction of Colonel Macdonell’s friends, that as Colonel Macdonell’s MSS. exist, and are in the possession of Colonel I. J. Macdonell, I have (except at p. 243, when quoting from Boulanger,) expressly excluded the consideration of the influence of the Hebrew upon general tradition, which, however, will be necessary for the full discussion of the question.

Whatever, therefore, Colonel Macdonell may have written will remain over and above in illustration of the tradition. But whether on the lines of Hebrew or primeval tradition, these views will inevitably run counter to the mythological theories now in the ascendant. These views, indeed, have been so long relegated to darkness, and perhaps appropriately, on account of their opposition to the prevalent solar theories, “flouted like owls and bats” whenever they have ventured into the daylight, that it will be with something amounting to absolute astonishment that the learned will hear that there are people who still entertain them: “itaque ea nolui scribere, quæ nec indocti intelligere possent, nec docti legere curarent” (Cic. Acad. Quæs., 1. i. § 2).

I can sincerely say, however, that although my theories place me in a position of antagonism to modern science, yet that I have written in no spirit of hostility to science or the cause of science.

I have throughout excluded the geological argument, for the first and sufficient reason that I am not a geologist; and secondly, by the same right and title, that geologists, e.g. Sir C. Lyell, in his “Antiquity of Man,” ignores the arguments and facts to which I have directed special attention.

Nevertheless, I find that competent witnesses have come to conclusions not materially different from those which have been arrived at, on the ground of history, within their own department of geology. I have more especially in my mind the following passage from a series of papers, “On Some Evidences of the Antiquity of Man,” by the Rev. A. Weld, in the Month (1871), written with full knowledge and in a spirit of careful and fair appreciation of the evidence. He says:—

“These evidences, such as they are, are fully treated in the work of Sir C. Lyell, entitled ‘Antiquity of Man,’ which exhausted the whole question as it stood, when the last edition was published in the year 1863. It is worthy of note that though the conclusion at which the geologist arrives is hesitating and suggestive, rather than decisive, and though nothing of importance, as far as we are aware, has been added to the geological aspect of the question since that time—except that the reality of the discovery of human remains has been verified, and many additional discoveries of a similar character have been made—still the opinion, which was then new and startling, has gradually gained ground, until we find writers assuming as a thing that needs no further proof, that the period of man’s habitation on the earth is to be reckoned in tens of thousands of years.”—The Month (May and June 1871), p. 437.

Among various works, bearing on matters contained in these pages, which have come to hand during the course of publication, I may mention—

“The Mythology of the Aryan Nations,” by the Rev. G. W. Cox, referred to in notes at pp. 158, 165, 396.

The third edition of Sir John Lubbock’s “Pre-historic Times.”

Mr E. B. Tylor’s “Primitive Culture,” referred to in notes at pp. 41, 136, 300.

Mr St George Mivart’s “Genesis of Species.”

Mr F. Seebohm on “International Reform.”

Sir H. S. Maine’s “Village Communities.”

The Archbishop of Westminster’s paper, read before the Royal Institution, “On the Dæmon of Socrates.”

“Orsini’s Life of the Blessed Virgin,” translated by the Very Rev. Dr Husenbeth.

“Hints and Facts on the Origin of Man,” by the Very Rev. Dr P. Melia, 1872, who says (p. 59), “Considering the great length of life of the first patriarchs, Moses must have had every information through non-interrupted tradition. If we reflect that Shem for many years saw Methuselah, a contemporary of Adam, and that Shem himself lived to the time of Abraham, ... that Abraham died after the birth of Jacob, and that Jacob saw many who were alive when Moses was born, we see that a few generations connect Moses not only with Noah, but also with Adam.” I quote this passage as it is important to place in the foreground of this inquiry the unassailable truth that (apart from revelation) the historical account of the origin of the human race, to which all others converge, is consistent with itself, and bears intrinsic evidence of credibility.

An analogous argument with reference to Christian tradition was sketched in a lecture by Mr Edward Lucas, and published in 1862, “On the First Two Centuries of Christianity.”

With reference to other parts of these pages, much supplemental matter will be found in—

“Historical Illustrations of the Old Testament,” by the Rev. G. Rawlinson, M.A., Camden Prof., where, at pp. 19, 20, will be found direct testimony to what I had conjectured from indirect evidence at pp. 270, 271—viz., that the Polynesian islanders “have a clear and distinct tradition of a Deluge, from which one family only, eight in number, was saved in a canoe.”

Also, but from a different point of view, in “Legends of Old Testament Characters,” by Rev. S. Baring Gould, M.A.

The articles in the Tablet “On Arbitration instead of War,” to which I have referred in chap. xiv. at p. 380, have recently been collected and reprinted by Lord Robert Montagu, M.P.

If I have exceeded in quotation, I must direct my readers, for the defence of this mode of composition, from the point of view of tradition, to a work which I trust some in this busy age still find leisure to read, Mr Kenelm Digby’s “Mores Catholici,” i. 40.

I must, moreover, add a passage from the general preface to the recent republication of Mr Disraeli’s works, which I came upon too late to introduce into the body of this book, but which I feel sure the reader, even if he has met with it before, will not be reluctant to reperuse:—

“The sceptical effects of the discoveries of science, and the uneasy feeling that they cannot co-exist with our old religious convictions have their origin in the circumstance that the general body who have suddenly become conscious of these physical truths are not so well acquainted as is desirable with the past history of man. Astonished by their unprepared emergence from ignorance to a certain degree of information, their amazed intelligence takes refuge in the theory of what is conveniently called progress, and every step in scientific discovery seems further to remove them from the path of primæval inspiration. But there is no fallacy so flagrant as to suppose that the modern ages have the peculiar privilege of scientific discovery, or that they are distinguished as the epochs of the most illustrious inventions. On the contrary, scientific invention has always gone on simultaneously with the revelation of spiritual truths; and more, the greatest discoveries are not those of modern ages. No one for a moment can pretend that printing is so great a discovery as writing, or algebra as language. What are the most brilliant of our chemical discoveries compared with the invention of fire and the metals? It is a vulgar belief that our astronomical knowledge dates only from the recent century, when it was rescued from the monks who imprisoned Galileo; but Hipparchus, who lived before our Divine Master, and who, among other sublime achievements, discovered the precession of the equinoxes, ranks with the Newtons and the Keplers; and Copernicus, the modern father of our celestial science, avows himself, in his famous work, as only the champion of Pythagoras, whose system he enforces and illustrates. Even the most modish schemes of the day on the origin of things, which captivate as much by their novelty as their truth, may find their precursors in ancient sages; and after a careful analysis of the blended elements of imagination and induction which characterise the new theories, they will be found mainly to rest on the atom of Epicurus and the monad of Thales. Scientific, like spiritual truth, has ever from the beginning been descending from Heaven to man. He is a being who organically demands direct relations with his Creator, and he would not have been so organised if his requirements could not be satisfied. We may analyse the sun and penetrate the stars; but man is conscious that he is made in God’s own image, and in his perplexity he will ever appeal to our Father which art in Heaven.”

MEMOIR
OF
COLONEL GEORGE MACDONELL, C.B.

The following notice appeared in the Times, May 23, 1870—“In our obituary column of Saturday we announced the death of Colonel George Macdonell, C.B., at the advanced age of ninety. This officer, who was a cadet of the ancient and loyal Scottish house of Macdonell of Glengarry, was the son of an officer who served under the flag, and who, as we have been told, was on the staff, of Prince Charles Edward Stuart at the battle of Culloden, where he was severely wounded. His son, the Colonel now deceased, was born in 1779, or early in the following year; obtained his first commission in 1796, and was nominated a Companion of the Bath in 1817. He saw active service in the war in North America with the 79th Foot, and received the gold medal for the action at Châteaugay; and had he not accepted the retirement a few years since, he would have been, at his death, almost the senior officer in the army holding Her Majesty’s commission. The late Colonel Macdonell, who adhered to the Roman Catholic religion professed by his ancestors, and for which they fought so gallantly under the Stuart banners, married, in 1820, the Hon. Laura Arundell, sister of the Lord Arundell of Wardour, but was left a widower in May 1854.” His son, Colonel I. J. Macdonell, now commands the 71st Highlanders.

I take this opportunity of adding a few facts, not without interest, to the above brief summary of a not uneventful life, as they might otherwise pass unrecorded. In the sentiment of the Gaelic saying—“Curri mi clach er do cuirn” (Wilson, “Archæol. Scot.,” p. 59)—“I will add a stone to your cairn.”

Colonel Macdonell’s father, as stated in the above account, was wounded at Culloden in the thigh, but was able to crawl on all-fours, after the battle, eighteen miles, to a barn belonging to a member of the Grant family. He there remained in concealment for six months, leaving nature to heal the wound; but the search in the neighbourhood in time becoming too hot, he had to decamp, and walked with a stick all the way to Newcastle, where he was not greatly re-assured by meeting a soldier who had just been drummed out of his regiment as a Catholic, with the word “Papist” placarded on his back. He, however, escaped all dangers, and reached Hull, and subsequently Versailles or St Germains, where he remained three years, or at least till the events following the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle dispersed the Prince’s adherents. He then returned to England under the Act of Indemnity, entered the royal army, and was present with General Wolfe at the taking of Quebec. If I remember rightly, he had the good fortune to take an aide-de-camp of Montcalm’s prisoner, with important dispatches.

Colonel Macdonell’s maternal uncle, Major Macdonald (Keppoch), was taken prisoner at the battle of Falkirk. He was said to have been the first man who drew blood in the war. By a curious revenue of fortune, he was carried back into the enemy’s ranks by the horse of a trooper whom he had captured. He was executed at Carlisle, and the circumstances of his execution supplied Sir Walter Scott, I believe, with the incidents which he worked up into the narrative of MacIvor’s execution in “Waverley.” His sword is in the possession of Mr P. Howard of Corby Castle, near Carlisle.

Fortune, however, had in store another revenge; for the Duke of Cumberland being present, many years afterwards, at a ball at Bath, by a most unhappy selection indicated as the person with whom he wished to dance a beautiful girl who turned out to be no other than the daughter of Major Macdonald (afterwards married to Mr Chichester of Calverley) the circumstances of whose execution have just been referred to. She rose in deference to royalty, but replied, in a tone which utterly discomfited, and put his Royal Highness to flight—“No, I will never dance with the murderer of my father!”

With these antecedents, it is needless to add that Colonel G. Macdonell was a warm admirer of the Stuarts, and not unnaturally extended his sympathy and adhesion to the kindred cause of legitimacy in France; and the one event to which he always looked forward, and confidently predicted—the restoration of the monarchy in the person of Henri V.—is now, if not imminent, at least “the more probable of possible events.” There was, however, a belief which somewhat conflicted in his mind with the above anticipation—namely, his unshaken conviction that the Dauphin did not die in the Temple. He was frequently at Holyrood when the palace was occupied by Charles X., and he accompanied the Duchess de Berri to the place of embarkation for her unfortunate expedition to France. Colonel Macdonell also acted as the medium of communication between the French Royalists and the English Government; and on one important occasion conveyed intelligence to Lord Bathurst or Lord Sidmouth respecting the movements of the secret societies in Spain in 1823 some hours before it reached them by the ordinary channel. Part of the communication was made on information supplied by the Abbé Barruel; and in reply, Lord Sidmouth said—“Well, I remember Edmund Burke telling me that he believed every word that Barruel had written, and I fully accept the authority.”

Colonel Macdonell was under the impression that he was unwittingly and remotely the cause of the break up of the Ministry of “all the talents.” As this is an obscure point in history, it may be worth while to give the following facts. The impression produced by Marengo and Austerlitz had led to the Army Reform Bill of 1806, in which the points discussed were almost identical with those which lately excited the public mind. The disasters which accompanied our descent on Egypt in 1807, and the consequent evacuation of Alexandria, created considerable discontent and re-opened the question, and as further reforms on minor points were contemplated, suggestions from officers in the army were invited.

Colonel Macdonell (then only lieutenant), wrote to Mr Windham, the Secretary at War, to point out that any broken attorney might create considerable embarrassment at any critical moment, seeing that, as the law then stood (an Act of George I. had extended the obligation of taking the sacrament to privates), any soldier could obtain, if not his own, his comrade’s discharge by pointing him out as a Papist. The danger was recognised, and Mr Windham brought in a bill directed to meet the case, but its introduction revived the larger question of the repeal of the Tests’ Acts and of the Catholic claims; and the discussion eventuated in Lord Howick’s bill, which was met by the King’s refusal, and the consequent resignation of the Ministry. This may explain the statement (mentioned in the obituary notice in the Times of the Marquis of Lansdowne), that he (Lord Lansdowne) could never understand how the Ministry came to be dissolved. “He had heard instances of men running their heads against a wall, but never of men building up a wall against which to run their heads.”[3]

It has been mentioned that Colonel Macdonell entered the army when quite a boy; and there were few men, I fancy, living, when he died last year, who could boast, as he could, of having served in the Duke of York’s campaign in the last century, but I am not able to state in what regiment. He was for some time previously in Lord Darlington’s regiment of Fencibles. He was at one period in the 8th, and at another in the 50th regiment, in which latter, I think, he went out to the West Indies and Canada.

It was in Canada, however, that his principal services were rendered, which indeed were considerable, and have never been adequately acknowledged.

When the Americans invaded Canada upon the declaration of war in 1812, it is hardly necessary to remind the reader that almost all our available troops were engaged in the Peninsula, and that Canada was pretty well left to its own resources.

Under these circumstances it will be recognised as of some importance that Colonel Macdonell was able to raise a regiment among the Macdonells of his clan who had settled there. But the conditions made with him were not fulfilled, and the command of the regiment, almost immediately after it was raised, was transferred to the command of a Protestant and an Orangeman, which caused a mutiny which was with difficulty suppressed. Now, it must be borne in mind that the regiment was only raised through his personal influence with the clan, and through that of its pastor, Bishop Macdonell, and that the adhesion of the Catholic Macdonells went far to determine the attitude of the French Canadians also. There were not more than 1200 regular troops in Upper Canada during the war.[4]

Before referring to the actions in which Colonel Macdonell was engaged, I will add the following particulars as to the Highland settlement which Colonel Macdonell gave me. In 1798, the submission of the Highland chiefs to the House of Hanover having been of some standing, and their adhesion being, moreover, cemented in a common sentiment of abhorrence of the French Revolution, they were willingly induced to raise regiments among their clans. This was done by Glengarry, Macleod, and others. At the peace these regiments were disbanded, but finding that complications of various sorts had necessarily arisen during their absence respecting their lands and holdings at home, and, in point of fact, that they had no homes to return to, the greater part remained temporarily domiciled at Glasgow, the place of their disbandment. I infer that they remained under the charge and direction of Bishop Macdonell, who had accompanied them in their campaigns as chaplain, and was the first Catholic priest officially recognised in the capacity of regimental chaplain. At Glasgow (previously only served as a flying mission), he hired a storehouse, which he opened as a chapel, but stealthily only, as two of the congregation were always posted as a guard at the entrance on Sunday. He found only eighteen Catholics at Glasgow at that time, i.e., I suppose, previously to the disbandment of the Highlanders. Through Bishop Macdonell’s influence with Lord Sidmouth—who, although a strong opponent of the Catholic claims, always acted in his relations with him, he said, in the most honourable and straightforward way—the emigration of the Highlanders to Canada was shortly afterwards arranged.

Colonel Macdonell was subsequently partially reinstated in his command of the Glengarry regiment. The important services rendered by Colonel Macdonell in Canada, to which I have alluded, were—1. The taking of Ogdensburg at a critical moment, on his own responsibility, and contrary to orders, which had the effect of diverting the American attack from Upper Canada at a moment when it was entirely undefended; and, 2. Bringing the regiment of French Canadian militia, then temporarily under his command, from Kingston, by a forced run down the rapids of the St Lawrence without pilots (passing the point where Lord Amherst lost eighty men), in time enough (he arrived the day before, unknown to the Americans) to support De Saluberry at the decisive action at Chateaugay. De Saluberry indeed had only 300 French Canadians under his command, which, with the 600 brought up by Colonel Macdonell, only made up a force of 900 (with about 100 Indians), with which to check General Hampton’s advance with some 7000 (the Americans stated the force at 5520 infantry and 180 cavalry, James, i. 305) in his advance on Montreal. In point of fact, Colonel Macdonell must be considered, on any impartial review of the facts, to have won the day (vide infra), yet he was not even mentioned in Sir G. Prevost’s dispatch.

Colonel Macdonell received the Companionship of the Bath for the taking of Ogdensburg, and the gold medal for his conduct in the action at Chateaugay.

I append the following accounts of the affairs at Ogdensburg and Chateaugay, adding a few particulars in correction and explanation—Alison, “History of Europe,” xix. 121 (7th ed.), says—“Shortly after Colonel M’Donnell (Macdonell), with two companies of the Glengarry Fencibles, and two of the 8th, converted a feigned attack which he was ordered to make on Fort Ogdensburg into a real one. The assault was made under circumstances of the utmost difficulty; deep snow impeded the assailants at every step, and the American marksmen, from behind their defences, kept up a very heavy fire; but the gallantry of the British overcame every obstacle, and the fort was carried, with eleven guns, all its stores, and two armed schooners in the harbour.” The difficulties, as I have understood from Colonel Macdonell, were not so much from the impediments of the snow, as from the dangerous state of the St Lawrence at the time, the ice literally waving under the tramp of his men as he passed them over (ten paces apart). The stroke of the axe, by which they judged, told it indeed to be only barely safe, and it had never been crossed by troops before at that point, as it was deemed insecure, being within three miles of the Gallops Rapids. (Among the guns were some taken from General Burgoyne.)

A fuller account of the taking of Ogdensburg may be read in Mr W. James’ “Full and Correct Account of the Military Occurrences of the late War between Great Britain and the United States of America,” vol. i. p. 135–141: London, 1818; he adds, “Previously to dismissing the affair at Ogdensburg it may be right to mention that Sir G. Prevost’s secretary, or some person who had the transcribing of Major (Colonel) Macdonnell’s (Macdonell’s) official letter, must have inserted by mistake the words ‘In consequence of the commands of his Excellency.’ Of this there needs no stronger proof than that Major (Colonel) Macdonnell (Macdonell) while he was in the heat of the battle, received a private note from Sir G. dated from ’Flint’s Inn at 9 o’clock,’ repeating his orders not to make the attack; and even in the first private letter which Sir G. wrote to Major Macdonnell (Colonel Macdonell) after being informed of his success, he could not help qualifying his admiration of the exploit with a remark that the latter had rather exceeded his instructions—(Note.—Both of these letters the author has seen”), vol. i. 140. Colonel Macdonell’s explanation to me of his taking this responsibility on himself was simply that he saw that the fate of the whole of Upper Canada depended upon it. Colonel Macdonell had received information that 5000 American troops were moving up in the direction of Ogdensburg, and they, in fact, came up a week after it was taken, under General Pike; but seeing the altered aspect of affairs, they moved off, and fell back upon Sackett’s Harbour, anticipating a similar attack at that point.

Colonel Macdonell always spoke with much emotion of the gallant conduct of a Captain Jenkins, a young officer under his command, who, although he had both arms shattered by two successive shots, struggled on at the head of his men until he swooned. He survived some years, but died of the overcharge of blood to the head consequent on the loss of his limbs.

As Ogdensburg was a frontier town on the American side of the St Lawrence, Sir G. Prevost authorised payment for any plunder by the troops, but Colonel Macdonell received a certificate from the inhabitants that they had not lost a single shilling—which must be recorded to the credit of the Glengarry Highlanders under his command.

As I have already said, although Colonel Macdonell commanded the larger force, and by an independent command, at the action of Chateaugay, his name is not mentioned in Sir G. Prevost’s dispatch, nor in Alison, who apparently follows the official account (xix. 131, 7th ed.) In Alison, De Saluberry is called, by a clerical error, De Salavary—such, after all, is fame! saith Hyperion. Although his troops, raw levies, broke, and Colonel De Saluberry was virtually a prisoner when Colonel Macdonell came up to the support, it was through no fault of his disposition of his men—(Colonel Macdonell always spoke of him as an excellent officer, who behaved on the occasion in the most noble and intrepid manner).

The American troops at Chateaugay are variously stated at 7000 to 5700 (Alison says, “4000 effective infantry and 2000 militia, and 10 guns,” xix. 131). The British, 300 French Canadian militia, under De Saluberry; 600 under Colonel Macdonell, and some Indians, without artillery.

A full, but, Colonel Macdonell said, inaccurate account (from imperfect information) will be found in Mr W. James’ “Military Occurrences,” above referred to.

I extract the following passages, i. 307:—“The British advanced corps, stationed near the frontiers, was commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel De Saluberry of the Canadian Fencibles, and consisted of the two flank companies of that corps and four companies of voltigeurs, and six flank companies of embodied militia and Chateaugay chasseurs, placed under the immediate orders of Lieutenant-Colonel Macdonell, late of the Glengarrys, who so distinguished himself at Ogdensburg. The whole of this force did not exceed 800 rank and file. There were also at the post 172 Indians under Captain Lamotte.” Colonel Macdonell’s account differed substantially. It has been already mentioned that he had brought up his troops by a forced march the night before, and held them under a separate command. I conclude with the following passage as bearing out Colonel Macdonell’s version:—“The Americans, although they did not occupy one foot of the ‘abatis,’ nor Lieutenant-Colonel De Saluberry retire one inch from the ground on which he had been standing, celebrated this partial retiring as a retreat.... By way of animating his little band when thus momentarily pressed” [Colonel Macdonell’s version was, that although the troops were driven back, Colonel De Saluberry literally “refused to retire one inch himself,” and virtually remained a prisoner until—] Colonel De Saluberry ordered the bugleman to sound ”the advance. This was heard by Lieutenant-Colonel Macdonell, who thinking the Colonel was in want of support, caused his own bugles to answer, and immediately advanced with two [‘six’] of his companies. He at the same time sent ten or twelve buglemen into the adjoining woods with orders to separate [‘widely’], and blow with all their might. This little ‘ruse de guerre’ led the Americans to believe that they had more thousands than hundreds to contend with, and deterred them from even attempting to penetrate the ‘abatis.’”

For the rest of the account I must refer my readers to Mr W. James’ “History,” as above; though, if a complete and accurate account of an engagement which probably saved British Canada were ever thought desirable, Colonel Macdonell’s commentaries (MS.) on the above and the official accounts, would afford valuable supplementary information.[5]

TRADITION

PRINCIPALLY WITH REFERENCE TO

MYTHOLOGY AND THE LAW OF NATIONS.

CHAPTER I.
THE LAW OF NATIONS.

The increasing number of essays, pamphlets, works, and reviews of works on speculative subjects, with which the literature of England at present teems, compels the conclusion that the public mind has been greatly unsettled or strangely transformed since the days when John Bull was the plain matter-of-fact old gentleman that Washington Irving pleasantly described him.

Remembering the many sterling and noble qualities whimsically associated with this practical turn of mind, it will be felt by many to be a change for the worse. But if old English convictions, maxims, and ways of thought have lost their meaning; if in fine it is true that the mind of England has become unsettled, it says much for the practical good sense of Englishmen that they should have overcome their natural repugnances, and should so earnestly turn to the discussion of these questions, not indeed with the true zest for speculation, but in the practical conviction that it is in this arena that the battle of the Constitution must be fought.

There is, as it has been truly observed,[6] “an instinctive feeling that any speculation which affects this” (the speculation in question being the effect of the Darwinian theory on conscience), “must also affect, sooner or later, the practical principles and conduct of men in their daily lives. This naturally comes much closer to us than any question as to the comparative nearness of our kinship to the gorilla or the orang can be expected to do. No great modification of opinion takes place with respect to the moral faculties, which does not ultimately and in some degree modify the ethical practice and political working of the society in which it comes to prevail.”

There is perhaps no question which lies more at the root of political constitutions, and which must more directly determine the conduct of states in their relations to each other, than the question whether or not, or in what sense, there was such a thing as natural law, i.e. a law antecedent to the formation of individual political societies, and which is common to and binding on them all.

It may be worth while, therefore, to examine whether a stricter discrimination may not be made between things which are sometimes confounded, viz.:—The Law of Nations and International Law, natural law and the state of nature; and even if the attempt at discrimination should fail in exactitude, it may yet, by opening out fresh views, contribute light to minds of greater precision, who may thus be enabled to hit upon the exact truth.

This view was partially exposed in an article which was inserted in the Tablet, September 28, 1861,[7] entitled “International Law and the Law of Nations,” and, all things considered, I do not think that I can better consult the interests of my readers, than by reproducing an extract from it here, as a convenient basis of operation from which to advance into a somewhat unexplored country:—

“It has been the fashion since Bentham’s[8] time, to substitute the phrase ‘International Law’ for the ‘Law of Nations,’ as if they were convertible terms. The substitution, however, covers a distinction sufficiently important.

“The ‘Law of Nations’ is an obligation which binds the consciences of nations to respect the eternal principle of justice in their relations with each other. ‘International law’ is the system of rules, precedents, and maxims accumulated in recognition of the eternal law. But as men may build a theatre or a gambling-house upon the foundations constructed for a religious edifice, and upon a stone consecrated for an altar, so has it been possible for diplomacy to substitute a system of chicanery for the simple laws which were intended to facilitate the intercourse of nations, and with such effect as in a great number of cases to place international law in contradiction with the law of nations—as, for instance, when in a certain case the law of nations says that it is wrong to invade a neighbour’s territory, international law is made to say that it is lawful to invade in such a case, because such-and-such monarchs in past history have done so.

“Practically the effect of the substitution is, that the sentiment of justice disappears, that wars which formerly were called unjust, are now called inevitable, so that good men, disheartened at the conflicting evidence of precedents, yield their sense of right and wrong, and defer to the adjudication of diplomatists. This is particularly satisfactory to the modern spirit which will admit nothing to be law which is superior to, and distinct from, that which the human intellect has determined to be law.

“But the sense of right and wrong in good men is that which gives its whole efficacy to the law of nations. There is nothing else in the last resort, to restrain the ambition and passion of princes, but the reprobation of mankind—nothing but the fear of invading that “moral territory”[9] which even bad men find it necessary to conquer, ‘dans l’ame des peuples ses voisins.’ On the other hand, the whole mass of precedents to which diplomatists appeal, which are rarely carefully collated with those which legists have accumulated and digested, is nothing but a veil which thinly covers the supremacy of might and the right of force.

“In fact, the conventional deference which is paid to them, is at best only the hypocritical homage which force is constrained to pay to justice before it strikes its blow.

“International law, therefore, as accumulated in the precedents of diplomatists, is a parasitical growth upon that tree which has its roots in the hearts of nations, and which may be compared to one of those old oaks under which kings used to sit and administer justice. It was a dream of Dodwell’s that the ‘law of nations was a divine revelation made to the family preserved in the ark.’ In the grotesqueness and wildness of this theory we detect a true idea. The law of nations is an unwritten law, tradited in the memories of the people, or, so far as it is written, to be found in the works of writers on public law, like Grotius, whose authorities, as Sir J. Mackintosh remarks, are in great part, and very properly, made up of the sayings of the poets and orators of the world, ‘for they address themselves to the general feelings and sympathies of mankind.’ It is in this that the Scriptural saying about the people is so true—‘But they will maintain the state of the world.’ And it is a just observation, that ‘the people are often wrong in their opinions, but in their sentiments rarely.’ You may produce state papers and manifestoes, written with all the dexterity of Talleyrand, and the lying tact of Fouché, but you will not convince the people. You have your opportunity. The Liberal press of Europe, at this moment, may be said to be in possession of the whole field of political literature; nevertheless, nothing will prevent its being recorded in history,[10] that Victor Emmanuel in seizing upon the patrimony of St Peter was a robber, and his conquest an usurpation.”

I have observed that International Law is the more appropriate term from Bentham’s point of view, and as Bentham is the most redoubtable opponent of natural right and the law of nations, I will quote him at some length:—

“Another man says that there is an eternal and immutable rule of right, and that that rule of right dictates so-and-so. And then he begins giving you his sentiments upon anything that comes uppermost; and these sentiments (you are to take it for granted) are so many branches of the eternal rule of right.... A great multitude of people are continually talking of the law of nature; and they go on giving you their sentiments about what is right and what is wrong, and these sentiments, you are to understand, are so many chapters and sections of the law of nature. Instead of the phrase, law of nature, you have sometimes law of reason, right reason, natural justice, natural equity, good order. Any of them will do equally well. This latter is most used in politics. The three last are much more tolerable than the others, because they do not very explicitly claim to be anything more than phrases. They insist, but feebly, upon the being looked upon as so many positive standards of themselves, and seem content to be taken, upon occasion, for phrases expressive of the conformity of the thing in question to the proper standard, whatever that may be. On most occasions, however, it will be better to say utility—utility is clearer, as referring more especially to pain and pleasure.”

In truth, although Mr Bentham indulges a pleasant ridicule, yet the ridicule and the thing ridiculed being eliminated, the fact that there is a belief in a law of nature remains untouched. It is probable, therefore, that appeals will be frequent to what is believed to be “the eternal and immutable rule of right,” “to the law of nature,” &c., i.e. each and every individual, all mankind distributively, so appeal, because there is a deep conviction among mankind, severally and collectively, that there is this eternal and immutable rule of right, blurred and obscured though it may be, or concealed behind a cloud of human passion and error: and most men, moreover, will have an instinct which will tell them when an individual is substituting his own ideas for the eternal and immutable law,—as, for instance, when at the conclusion of the sentence quoted, Mr Bentham seeks to substitute his own peculiar crochet, as embodied in the word “utility” (which may be used indifferently in the sense of the absolute or relative, the supernatural or the natural, the immediate or the remote utility), as synonymous with “natural justice,” “natural equity,” and “good order.”

So, again, when Mr Bentham comes to the discussion of “International Law,” after pointing out, very properly, that whereas internal laws have always a super-ordinate authority to enforce them, “that when nations fall into disputes there is no such super-ordinate impartial authority to bind them to conformity with any fixed rules,” Mr Bentham goes on to say, “though there is no distinct official authority capable of enforcing right principles of international law, there is a power bearing with more or less influence on the conduct of all nations, as of all individuals, however transcendently potent they may be, this is the power of public opinion.” Public opinion! not then of public opinion threatening coercion, for in that case we should have “a super-ordinate impartial authority binding to conformity with fixed rules,” but public opinion as a moral expression. If, however, you take from it the expression of right and wrong, of natural justice, and of the eternal and immutable law; if its expression is not reprobation, and, so to speak, a fore-judgment of the retribution of the Most High, but only dissatisfaction or the mere pronouncement of the inutility of the action, whatever it may be, what even with Benthamites can be its efficacy and worth? The vanquished say to their conqueror, the multitudes to their oppressor, this oppression is not according to utility. Utility! he replies, useful to whom? To you! Fancy the look of Prince Bismarck as he would reply to such an address. What are men if you take away the notion of right and wrong but “the flies of a summer?” How different was the expression of Napoleon after his ill-usage of Pius VII., “J’ai frissonè les nations.” Napoleon had a conscience,[11] and in his moments of calm reflection felt in its full force the reprobation of mankind.

When Bentham, still speaking of public opinion, adds:—

“The power in question has, it is true, various degrees of influence. The strong are better able to put it at defiance than the weak. Countries which, being the most populous, are likely also to be the strongest, carry a certain support of public opinion with all their acts whatever they may be. But still it is the only power which can be moved to good purposes in this case; and, however high some may appear to be above it, there are in reality none who are not more or less subject to its influence.”

Here Bentham is again in imagination gathering men together like the flies of a summer,—the force of their opinion depending on their numbers. But what, again, is the force of all this buzzing if it is the mere expression of “pleasure,” or “pain,” of satisfaction or dissatisfaction in the masses? Conquerors may not always be relentless, they may at times exhibit some sympathy with their fellow men; but as a rule they are so dominated by some one idea or passion, or at best are so absorbed in the interests of their own people, as to be deaf to such appeals. Prince Bismarck’s sentiments towards France during the late war are pretty well known; but it is said that after the conflict was over, and when France was in the throes of its terrible internecine conflict, he was asked, “What is your Excellency’s opinion of the present state of France?” he replied, “Das ist mit ganz wurst,” which is equivalent to “I don’t care two straws about it.”[12] How are men of this stamp to be affected by any exclamations of pleasure or pain? If on the contrary it is the voice of reprobation which they hear, and if in their case the saying “vox populi vox Dei” is felt to have its full application, there is then a public opinion expressed which is calculated to strike the conscience and inspire terror, and that is quite another matter.

De Tocqueville, from his own point of view, puts the argument in favour of natural justice very forcibly, and in a certain construction would express the identical truth for which I contend.

“I hold it to be an impious and an execrable maxim that, politically speaking, a people has a right to do whatever it pleases; and yet I have asserted that all authority originates in the will of the majority. Am I, then, in contradiction with myself? A general law which bears the name of Justice has been made and sanctioned, not only by a majority of this or that people, but by a majority of mankind. The rights of every people are consequently confined within the limits of what is just. A nation may be considered in the light of a jury which is empowered to represent society at large, and to apply the great general law of justice. Ought such a jury, which represents society, to have more power than the society in which the laws it applies originate.”—M. de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America”, ii. 151.

Although M. de Tocqueville’s view does not go to the full length of the argument, still, regarded in this light, the voice of the majority of mankind, or of any large masses of mankind, has a very different significance from what it bears in the writings of Bentham.

Let us now consider the doctrines of Bentham in their more recent exposition.

The Pall Mall Gazette, Oct. 6, 1870, says:—

“Laws have been described as definitions of pre-existing rights, relations between man and man, reflections of divine ordinances, anything but what they really are,—forms of organised constraint. It says little for the assumed clear-headedness of Englishmen, that they have very generally preferred the ornate jargon of Hooker, to the accurate and intelligible account of law and government which forms the basis of Bentham’s juridical system.”

It says much, however, for their strong political sense and sagacity. If this is the true and only description of law, it is tantamount to saying that law is force and force is law; in other words, that the commands of a legitimate government need not be regarded when it is weak, but that the enactments of power must always be obeyed, however it is acquired, and whether its decrees are in accordance with right or contrary to justice. It is a ready justification for tyranny, equally sanctioning the “lettres de cachet” of the ancient regime, and the proscriptions of the Convention, equally at hand for the National Assembly at Versailles, or for the Commune at Paris. But however much it may be disguised, it is the only alternative definition of law, when once you say that law is not of divine ordinance and tradition. If no regard is to be had to the definition of right, but the term law is to be applied to any adequate act of repression, there is in truth nothing but force. Yet why should force adequate to its purpose seek to cloak itself in the forms of law? I suppose the question must have been put and answered before; but the answer can only be because law is felt to import a totally different set of ideas from force.

It is necessary, more especially now that the utilitarian theory is dominant, to enter a protest according to the turn the argument may take, but in the end nothing more can be said than was said by Cicero in the century before our Lord:—

“Est enim unum jus, quo devincta est hominum societas, et quod lex constituit una; quæ lex est recta ratio imperandi atque prohibendi: quam qui ignorat is est injustus, sive est illa scripta uspiam, sive nusquam. Quod si justitia est obtemperatio scriptis legibus institutisque populorum, et si, ut iidem dicunt utilitate omnia metienda sunt, negliget leges, easque perrumpit, si poterit, is, qui sibi eam rem fructuosam putabit fore. Ita fit, ut nulla sit omnino justitia; si neque naturâ est, eaque propter utilitatem constituitur, utilitate alia convellitur.”—De Legibus, i. 15.

It is only upon this construction that the Law of Nations can be said to exist, as “there is no superordinate authority to enforce it.” It is accordingly asserted that the law of nations is not really law. But is not this only when it is regarded from the point of view of “organised constraint?”[13] If it is regarded as a divine ordinance, or even as under the divine sanction, then it is law in a much higher degree than simple internal or municipal law, for it more immediately and directly depends upon this sanction; and hence nations may more confidently appeal to heaven for the redress of wrong here below than individuals—seeing that, as Bossuet somewhere says, God rewards and chastises nations in this world, since it is not according to His divine dispensation to reward them corporately in the next.

More recently, however, the extraordinary successes and subversions which we have witnessed during this last year, have brought the Pall Mall Gazette face to face with problems pressing for immediate and anxious settlement; and in a series of articles it has discussed the question of the law of nations with much depth and earnestness.

I there observe phrases which I can hardly distinguish from those I have just employed. Combating Mr Mill’s view, the writer says:—

“Nobody knows better than he that International Law is not really law, and why it is not law; but he seems to have jumped to the conclusion that it is therefore the same thing as morality.... There cannot, in truth, be any closer analogy than that which we drew the other day between the law of nations and the law of honour, and between public war and private duelling.” [This is upon an assumption that there is nothing “essentially immoral in the code of honour,” as “to a great extent it coincided with morality.”] “But it differed from simple morality in that its precepts were enforced, not by general disapprobation, but by a challenge to the offender by anybody who supposed himself to be aggrieved by the offence. The possible result always was, that the champion of the law might himself be shot, and this was the weakness of the system. But this is exactly the weakness of international law, and the original idea at the basis both of public war and of private duelling was precisely the same,—that God Almighty somehow interposed in favour of the combatant who had the juster cause. There is clear historical evidence that the feuds which became duels were supposed to be fought out under divine supervision, just as battles were believed to be decided by the God of battles.”

I believe that if history could be re-written from this point of view that many startling revelations would be brought to light. It is with reluctance that I turn from the points upon which I approach to agreement with the writer, to those upon which we fundamentally differ.

And here I must remark, that “the accurate and intelligible account of law and government which forms the basis of Bentham’s juridical system”[14] (supra, p. 9), is not distinguishable from, and in any case ultimately depends upon, his theory of utility as a foundation, or, as his later disciples say, a “standard” of morals. Such a standard is the negation of all morality; and if it ever came to stand alone every notion of morals would be obliterated, because, being open to every interpretation, and incapable of supplying any definite rule itself, it would abrogate every other, and under a plausible form abandon mankind to its lusts and passions.

In the Pall Mall Gazette, April 12, 1871, an article entitled “Mr Darwin on Conscience,” discusses Benthamism with reference to Darwinism. There is a fitness in this which does not immediately appear.

The writer says:—

“What is called the question of the moral sense is really two: how the moral faculty is acquired, and how it is regulated. Why do we obey conscience or feel pain in disobeying it? And why does conscience prescribe one kind of actions and condemn another kind? To put it more technically, there is the question of the subjective existence of conscience, and there is the question of its objective prescriptions.”

I will avail myself of this distinction, and, setting aside the questions referring to the “subjective existence of conscience,” I will ask attention only to “its objective prescriptions.” Assuming, then, the operations of conscience in the individual man, there will necessarily also have been in the course of history some outward expression of this inward feeling in maxims, precepts, and laws, if not also reminiscences of primeval revelations and divine commands.

It will be true, therefore, to say, without touching the deeper question of the foundation of morals, that there has been a tradition of morals which cannot but have had its influence in all ages upon the “social feelings” in which, according to the Pall Mall Gazette, “it will always be necessary to lay the basis of conscience.” Now is this tradition of morals identical with utilitarian precept? If the tradition of morals is identical with “the greatest happiness principle,” then that principle was no discovery of Bentham’s,[15] neither can Benthamism be regarded as “the new application of an old principle.” Bentham in that case simply informed mankind that they had been talking prose all their lives without knowing it! Benthamism, however, in point of fact, is felt as a new principle precisely in so far as it discards the old morality. The question which I ask is, how does it account for these old notions of morality obtaining among mankind? How is it that mankind has so long and so persistently, both in their notion of what was good and their sense of what was evil, departed from the line of their true interests, as disclosed in the utilitarian philosophy? If the history of man is what the Scriptures tell us it was, the manner in which this has come about is sufficiently explained; and there is no mystery as to the notion of sin, the necessity of expiation, the restraints and limitations of natural desires, the excellence of contemplation, and the obligation of sacrifices and prayers. Now, if the history of mankind is not to be invoked in explanation, it is difficult to see how these notions should not conflict with any theory and plan of life based on a principle of utility.[16] It is not unnatural, therefore, that the utilitarians should turn to Darwinism and other such kindred systems for the solution of their difficulties.

The Pall Mall Gazette, April 12, 1871, says:—

“Between Mr Darwin and utilitarians, as utilitarians, there is no such quarrel as he would appear to suppose. The narrowest utilitarian could say little more than Mr Darwin says (ii. 393):—‘As all men desire their own happiness, praise or blame is bestowed on actions and motives according as they tend to this end; and as happiness is an essential part of the general good, the greatest happiness principle indirectly serves as a nearly safe standard of right and wrong.’”

Now, there is nothing in this reiteration of Benthamism which has not been thrice refuted by Lord Macaulay in the Essays above referred to. I append an extract more exactly to the point.[17]

I refer to it because it will be interesting to see how the argument looks in its application to Darwinism.

It will be seen that if the conditions of unlimited enjoyment anywhere existed, Lord Macaulay’s strictures would lose something of their force. If, indeed, there was superabundance and superfluity of everything for all in this life, then anything which conduces to the satisfaction of the individual would add to, or at least would not detract from, the sum of happiness of all mankind. But unless you can show this—if even the reverse of this is the truth—then “the greatest happiness” will be in proportion to the self-abnegation of those who possess more, or have the greatest faculties or facilities of producing more.

Now, if there is one view more prominent than another in Mr Darwin’s work, it is embodied in the phrase to which he has given a new sense and significance, “the struggle for existence.” In the midst of this struggle for existence, what is there in the greatest happiness principle to bind the individual to abnegation? Why should he postpone his certain and immediate gratification to the remote advantage of others, or of distant and contingent advantage to himself? If, on the other hand, he regards the transitoriness of the enjoyment, and balances it against the fixity and eternity of the consequences, the argument takes altogether different proportions, and the temptation to enjoyment is inversely to the intensity of the struggle for existence.

I will take another test of Benthamism by Darwinism, which will more exactly bring out the argument for which I contend. We have a traditional horror of infanticide which revolts all our best feelings and shocks our principles. But if Mr Darwin has demonstrated this struggle for existence existing from all time; if also we are disembarrassed from all advertence to another world; if, further, Mr Malthus, before Mr Darwin, has shown reason to believe that over-population is the cause of half the evils of this life, what is there in Benthamite principles which should prevent our sacrificing these unconscious innocents to the greatest happiness of the greatest number? Nothing, except the horror we should excite among mankind still imbued with the old superstitions! A person who did not hold to Mr Malthus’ views might demur; but a Malthusian, who was also a disciple of Mr Bentham, could only hold back because his feelings were better than his principles. A disciple of Mr Darwin’s would probably stand aloof, and would merely see in our notions an artificial interference with the working of his theory, preventing the struggle for existence going on according to natural laws. This seems to me to be almost said in the same article from the Pall Mall Gazette, from which I have quoted. Mr Darwin, in his “Origin of Species” (p. 249), has pointed out that “we ought to admire the savage instinct which leads the queen-bee to destroy her young daughters as soon as born, because this is for the good of the community.” And in his new book he says, firmly and unmistakably (i. 73), that “if men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker-bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters, and no one would think of interfering.” The Pall Mall continues—

“If, from one point of view, this is apt to shock a timorous and unreflecting mind, by asserting that the most cherished of our affections might have been, under certain circumstances, a vicious piece of self-indulgence, and its place in the scale of morality taken by what is now the most atrocious kind of crime; nevertheless, from another point of view, such an assertion is as reassuring as the most absolute of moralists could desire, for it is tantamount to saying that the foundations of morality, the distinctions of right and wrong, are deeply laid in the very conditions of social existence; that there is, in the face of these conditions, a positive and definite difference between the moral and the immoral, the virtuous and the vicious, the right and the wrong, in the actions of individuals partaking of that social existence.”

This is very well. It is so now, because of the traditional sentiments and principles which still retain their force—but how long will it continue?

I invite attention to the following passage from Mr Hepworth Dixon’s “New America” (vol. i. p. 312, 6th edition), which I must say struck me very forcibly when I read it. He narrates a conversation which he had with Brigham Young on the subject of incest:—“Speaking for himself, not for the church, he (Brigham Young) said he saw none at all (i.e. no objection at all). He added, however, that he would not do it himself,—‘my prejudices prevent me.’” Upon which Mr Hepworth Dixon observes—

“This remnant of an old feeling brought from the Gentile world, and this alone, would seem to prevent the saints (Mormons) from rushing into the higher forms of incest. How long will these Gentile sentiments remain in force? ‘You will find here,’ said elder Stenhouse to me, talking on another subject, ‘polygamists of the third generation. When these boys and girls grow up and marry, you will have in these valleys the true feeling of patriarchal life. The old world is about us yet, and we are always thinking of what people may say in the Scottish hills and the Midland shires.’”

Here, and in the previous extract, we seem to catch glimpses of what the morality of the future is likely to be, at any rate in such matters as infanticide and incest, if old notions are to be discarded, and men are left, in each generation, to no higher rule than their own individual calculation as to pleasure and pain, or to the prevailing sense or determination of the community as to what the conditions of utility may permit.

The nineteenth century is now verging on its decline, and of it, too, may we say that it has been better than its principles. Yet, in spite of its philanthropy, and its aspirations for good, the destructive principles which it has nursed are rapidly gaining on its instincts: and if we may not truly at this moment paint its glories, as they have been depicted, I think by Alexandre Dumas, as “the livery of heroism, turned up with assassination and incest,” is the time very remote when the description will apply?

CHAPTER II
THE LAW OF NATURE.

But underlying the question of the law of nations, and determining it, is the question whether or not there is a law of nature—a rule of right and wrong, independent of, and anterior to, positive legislative or international enactment. To prevent misconception, however, as to the scope of the inquiry, it is as well that I should state that I am only regarding the law of nature as the law of conscience (by which the Gentiles “were a law unto themselves,” Rom. ii. 14), in so far as it has manifested itself in laws and maxims; and the question I am here concerned with is, whether in any sense which history can take cognizance of, there was a rule of right and wrong previous to legislative enactment?

At the first glance, the question would seem sufficiently disposed of by saying that men never were in a state of nature; which is true in this sense, that mankind never formed a multitude of isolated individuals, or a promiscuous herd of men and women. A totally different solution supposes a state of nature; but which, whether it depicts it as a golden age or an age of barbarism, still contemplates mankind in this state as a mere congeries of individuals, without law, or else without the necessity of law—in either case an aggregate of isolated individuals, eventually to be brought into the state of civil society by a social compact.

Now my intention is not to combat this view—which at the present moment may be considered to be exploded—but to account for it.

I think that I shall do something towards clearing up this mystery by pointing out that this latter solution, although in great vogue with the publicists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is traced beyond them to the classical times, and was derived by them through the tradition of the Roman law from Paganism. A theory of the lawyers, and a theory of the philosophers, concreted with a true but distorted fact in tradition in order to produce this belief, viz., that society was founded by a contract among men who were originally equal.[18]

I shall in a subsequent chapter state to what extent I believe it to be true that society was founded upon a contract, and also the way in which this impression was confirmed, from the actual circumstances of the formation of the early communities of Greece and Italy; and I shall then examine the true tradition, such as I believe it to be, of a state of nature associated with the reminiscence of a golden age, as contrasted with the distinct yet parallel tradition of a state of nature identified with a state of barbarism (vide [ch. vii.] and [ch. xiii.])

This latter tradition I believe to have been a recollection of that period of temporary privation after the Flood, when mankind clung to the caverns and the mountains (vide [p. 137]), until, incited by the example of Noah, they were brought into the plains, and instructed in the arts of husbandry by the patriarch; and the notion of the primitive equality[19] of condition I believe to have originated in the Bacchanalian traditions of the same patriarch.[20]

If we start with a belief in the primitive equality of conditions, the only way out of the mesh is apparently by a theory of a compact.

“From the Roman law downwards,” says Sir G. C. Lewis, “there has been a strong tendency among jurists to deduce recognised rights and obligations from a supposed, but non-existing contract. When an express contract exists, the legal rights and duties which it creates are in general distinct and well-defined. Hence, in cases where it is wished that similar legal consequences should be drawn, which come within the spirit of the rules applicable to a contract, though they do not themselves involve any contract, the lawyer cuts the knot by saying that a contract is presumed, that there is a contract by intendment of law, that there are certain rights and obligations “quasi ex contractu.” Thus the Roman law held that a guardian was bound to his ward by a quasi contract.”—Sir G. C. Lewis, “On the Methods of Observation, &c, in Politics,” i. 423; “On the Social Compact,” pp. 424–431.

It is not difficult to see how such a fiction of the law would tend to give shape and system to the vague tradition as to the fact among the populace.

The way in which the philosopher came to his conclusion was somewhat more complex. It will have been seen that the notion of the state of nature and the social compact was, among the ancients, in the main, a figment of the imagination, and not a tradition. But there was also a tradition of a law of nature which did not at all correspond to a state of license, of equality, and of barbarism, such as the state of nature was conceived to be. It was, on the contrary, a law of decorum and restraint. What, then, the Roman probably meant by the law of nature was a reminiscence of a primitive revelation, or a tradition of the maxims of right and wrong by which men were guided in their relations to one another, when fresh from the hand of God—“a diis recentes”—when family life still subsisted, and before men had settled down into states and communities. It was not a law of nature as nature then was, but an aspiration after a lost rule of life, as after a higher standard, and an attempt to trace it back, through the corruption of mankind. Dim and uncertain as these notions were, they were not without their influence.

But their ideas as to the cosmogony were more shadowy still. When, then, in reasoning from a law of nature to a state of nature, mankind discovered that they knew or remembered nothing of their origin, or of the history of the human race, except indirectly through legendary lore, they then had recourse to the philosophers. These latter then did what philosophers incline to do in such cases of difficulty. They regarded the existing state of things, and finding it to be artificial, they, by a process of abstraction, resolved it into its elements, and, having thus reduced society into an assemblage of individuals, substituted their last analysis for the commencement of all things. In this analysis they found men, what historically and in fact they had never been, alike free, equal, and independent.

The theory of the social compact among men individually free and equal was in the main a fiction, started à posteriori to account for relations otherwise obscure, or, as Sir Henry Maine explains, to facilitate modifications which were felt to be desirable; and we cannot be astonished that Paganism should take this view, unless we are prepared to believe that the traditions truly embodying the history of the world were more direct, vivid, and potential than I suppose them to have been. It is at least remarkable, that in proportion as men lose their faith, they fall back, as if by some necessary law, upon some theory which directly or indirectly contemplates mankind as a collection of atoms; and if ever society should lose again the history of its origin, as would happen if ever infidelity were to gain complete ascendancy, it would return by the same processes to the same conclusion. But however sceptical individual minds may become, or however general may be the disposition to reject or ignore the scriptural narrative, the general framework of its statements is now too firmly embedded in the belief of mankind to be easily overthrown.

The notion of a social compact, in more recent times, obtained a certain credence[21] so long as the discussion was confined to Hobbes, Locke, and their disciples. And it must be borne in mind that this is a very taking theory, a ready and convenient starting point, and conformable to much that is true in history and politics. But it is long since exploded; and even the fervid advocacy of Rousseau, in an age peculiarly predisposed for its reception, could not secure for it even temporary recognition among mankind; and why? Because, whenever the discussion cools, men will inevitably ask each other the question, If such a compact took place, where shall we locate it consistently with the evidence recorded in Genesis? Remove the evidence in Genesis, and such a theory becomes at once a tenable and plausible conjecture.

As I shall have occasion, later on, to come into collision with Sir Henry Maine upon some points, I have the greater satisfaction here in invoking his testimony. This acute and learned writer (“Ancient Law,” p. 90) regrets that the Voltairean prejudices of the last century prevented reference “to the only primitive records worth studying—the early history of the Jews[22].... One of the few characteristics which the school of Rousseau had in common with the school of Voltaire was an utter disdain of all religious antiquities, and more than all of those of the Hebrew race. It is well known that it was a point of honour with the reasoners of that day to assume, not merely that the institutions called after Moses were not divinely dictated, ... but that they and the entire Pentateuch were a gratuitous forgery executed after the return from the Captivity. Debarred, therefore, from one chief security against speculative delusion, the philosophers of France, in their eagerness to escape from what they deemed a superstition of the priests, flung themselves headlong into a superstition of the lawyers.”

CHAPTER III
PRIMITIVE LIFE.

The scriptural narrative seems to establish:—(1.) That human society did not commence with the fortuitous concurrence of individuals, but that, though originating with a single pair, for the purposes of practical inquiry it commences with a group of families—the family of Noah and his sons, together with their families, and whose dispersion in other families is subsequently recorded. (2.) That men were not primitively in a state of savagery, barbarism, and ignorance of civil life; but that, on the contrary, it is presumable that Noah and his family brought with them out of the ark the traditions and experiences of two thousand years, and, not to speak of special revelations, the arts of civil life and acquaintance with cities. (3.) That, although everything in the early state of mankind would have led to dispersion, and although there is mention of one great and complete dispersion, yet this dispersion of mankind was a dispersion of families and not of individuals.

In all our speculations, therefore, as to society and government, it is the family and not the individual whom we must regard as the elementary constituent.

Moreover, so long as family government sufficed, there was nothing but the family. The state would have existed only in germ (vide infra, [p. 341]), and would have remained thus inchoate even during that subsequent period when families were affiliated in tribal connection, though not yet coalesced into tribal union. It is my impression, that the period during which family government sufficed, continued much longer than is generally supposed; for, until the world became peopled and crowded, everything led to dispersion and the continuance of the pastoral state of life. From the necessities of pastoral life, mankind in early times could not have been gregarious—herds would have become intermixed, keep would have become short, the broad plains were spread out before them;[23] e.g. Gen. chap. xiii.—

“But Lot also, who was with Abraham, had flocks of sheep, and herds and tents. 6. Neither was the land able to bear them, that they might dwell together. 7. Whereupon there arose a strife between the herdsmen of Abraham and Lot; and at that time the Canaanite and the Perizzite dwelt in that country. 8. Abraham therefore said, Let there be no quarrel. 9. Behold the whole land is before thee.”[24]

It is scarcely to be believed, that in such a state of society there would have been feuds, in the sense of inherited or hereditary quarrels, but at most contentions for particular localities; in which case the weaker or the discomfited party would have pushed on to other ground. There was no long contest, because there was nothing worth contesting. It has been noticed that only the highly civilised man, and the savage who has tasted blood, love fighting for the mere sake and ardour of the conflict. The simple barbarian does not fight until he is attacked, neither do the wild animals of the desert; their ferocity is limited and regulated by the necessity and the provocation. It is the exception, rather than the rule, for animals to fight among themselves. It is not in the nature of man or beast to fight without a reason. Accordingly, there is no such fomenter of war as war. Carver notices that the wars carried on between the Indian nations are principally on motives of revenge, and, when not on motives of revenge, their reasons for going to war are “in general more rational and just than such as are fought by Europeans, &c”—Carver’s “Travels in North America,” pp. 351, 297.[25]

The same tendencies, under similar circumstances, where the tribes were not crowded or in fear of warlike neighbours, was noticed among the Red Indians some forty years ago. Now, I suppose, instances would be rare.

“When a nation of Indians becomes too numerous conveniently to procure subsistence from its own hunting-grounds, it is no uncommon occurrence for it to send out a colony, or, in other words, to separate into tribes.... The tribe so separated maintains all its relations independent of the parent nation, though the most friendly intercourse is commonly maintained, and they are almost uniformly allies. Separations sometimes take place from party dissensions, growing generally out of the jealousies of the principal chiefs, and, not unfrequently, out of petty quarrels. In such instances, in order to prevent the unnecessary and wanton effusion of blood, and consequent enfeebling of the nation, the weaker party moves off usually without the observance of much ceremony.”[26]

Mr Grote in his “Plato”[27] says—

“There existed,” even “in his (Plato’s) time, a great variety of distinct communities—some in the simplest, most patriarchal, cyclopian condition, nothing more than families; some highly advanced in civilisation, with its accompanying good and evil, some in each intermediate stage between these two extremes. Each little family or sept exists at first separately, with a patriarch whom all implicitly obey, and peculiar customs of its own. Several of these septs gradually coalesce together into a community, choosing one or a few lawgivers to adjust and modify their respective customs into harmonious order.”[28]

In the situations, however, where the more powerful families had seized the vantage-ground, or established themselves in the richest and most coveted valleys, the tendency to consolidation and permanent settlement would have more rapidly manifested itself. As the tendency to family dispersion became restrained, and its scope restricted, disputes as to meum and tuum would have become more frequent as between families, some more central authority than the family headship would have been demanded for the protection, discrimination, and regulation of property. In these instances the state may be said to have arisen out of the expansion of the family into the tribes—the families, probably, never having ceased to dwell together in semi-aggregation; and, when greater concentration was required, they simply had to fall back upon the patriarchal chieftain. We seem to see a tradition of this in the Anax Andron.

But equally as regards the rest there must inevitably have come a time when, as the world became crowded, the same necessity of defending their possessions, would have caused families, among whom there was no affinity of race, to coalesce, intermix, succumb, and form communities and states.

These two modes of settlement into communities and states were, however, essentially dissimilar, and the basis thus laid would have remained permanently different. The one was the basis of custom, the other of contract; the one the settlement of the East, the other of the West; and it will be seen, I think, that whilst the one was more favourable to the conservation of traditions of religion and history, the other would have better preserved the tradition of right. These are points to which I shall return in a subsequent chapter, when I shall avail myself of the investigations of Sir Henry Maine.

This simple outline, however, of human history, conformable, as I believe it to be, with the scriptural narrative, conflicts with at least three theories now much in vogue. The first, which is substantially that of Sir John Lubbock, Mr Mill,[29] and Mr B. Gould, is thus conveniently summarised by Mr Hepworth Dixon.[30]

“Every one who has read the annals of our race—a page of nature with its counterfoil in the history of everything having life—is aware that, in our progress from the savage to the civilised state, man has had to pass through three grand stages, corresponding, as it were, to his childhood, to his youth, and to his manhood. In the first stage of his career he is a hunter, living mainly by the chase; in the second, he is a herdsman; ... in the third stage, he is a husbandman.... Then these conditions of human life may be considered as finding their purest types in such races as the Iroquois, the Arabian, the Gothic, in their present stage; but each condition is, in itself and for itself, an affair of development and not of race. The Arab, who is now a shepherd, was once a hunter. The Saxon, who is now a cultivator of the soil, was first a hunter, then a herdsman, before he became a husbandman. Man’s progress from stage to stage is continuous in its course, obeying the laws of physical and moral change. It is slow, it is uniform, it is silent, it is unseen. In one word, it is growth.... These three stages in our progress upward are strongly marked; the interval dividing an Iroquois from an Arab being as wide as that which separates an Arab from a Saxon.”

Now, in the first place, I must remark that the Iroquois and the Arab have never progressed;[31] neither does the Arab at the present show any signs of a transition to the third stage of necessary growth, nor does Mr Hepworth Dixon, although he gives some sound practical advice as to the best mode in which the red man is to be restrained, venture to suggest any mode by which he is to be reclaimed from the first to the third stage, either with or without a transition through the second stage of development. The conclusion therefore, one would think, would be inevitable that it is an affair of race and not of development. The Arab and the Iroquois, after the lapse of so many centuries, are still found with the evidences of primitive life strong upon them; and so, I imagine, we shall find it wherever we come upon a pure race of homogeneous origin. On the contrary, we shall find that mixed races, by the very law and reason of their admixture, have shown the greatest adaptibility, and, whenever circumstances were favourable, very rapid growth. Again, I very much question whether the three stages, or rather three phases of life were ever, as a rule, progressive; and whether, in the cases in which they might chance to have been successive, anything occurred in the transition at all resembling an uniform law of growth. It is very much more probable that the three were from the earliest period contemporaneous[32]—“and Abel was a shepherd, and Cain an husbandman” (Gen. iv.)—the determination of the sons to the avocations of shepherd, husbandman, and hunter respectively (the latter most probably being the last selected), being influenced by taste, character, and the division of the inheritance, the authority of the father, the geographical conditions of the route, and chance circumstances.

And this is the more confirmed when we consider that when once the hunter started on his career, he would have determined their avocation also for his posterity. At his death he would not have had herds of cattle to apportion to any one of his sons, and thus the taste for wild life, necessarily perpetuated, would be bred in the bone, as an indomitable characteristic of race, and the first hunter by choice would inevitably come to be the progenitor of generations of hunters by instinct and necessity.

The second theory depicts the opening scene of human existence as a state of conflict, which, it must be allowed, is perfectly consistent with the theory that it was one of savagery. The theory I am now combating was originally the theory of Hobbes; and I might have regarded it as now obsolete, were it not that it has cropped up quite recently in a most respectable quarter. Mr Hunter, in his charming work, “The Annals of Rural Bengal,” has a passage which, as I think, has been taken for more than it intends, though not for more than it expresses. Mr Hunter says, p. 89—

“The inquiry leads us back to that far-off time which we love to associate with patriarchal stillness. Yet the echoes of ancient life in India little resemble a Sicilian idyl or the strains of Pan’s pipe, but strike the ear rather as the cries of oppressed and wandering nations, of people in constant motion and pain. Early Indian researches, however, while they make havoc of the pastoral landscapes of Genesis and Job, have a consolation peculiarly suited to this age. They plainly tell us, that as in Europe so in Asia, the primitive state of mankind was a state of unrest; and that civilisation, despite its exactions and nervous city life, is a state of repose.”

It is plain that there is here question of restlessness rather than of violence; but grant that there was violence too, the account of Mr. Hunter when examined, so far from conflicting with, appears to me to fall exactly into, the lines I have indicated. Is not the scene, from before which Mr. Hunter lifts the curtain, the scene of that age following the dispersion (of which, p. 452, there is such distinct tradition in his pages), which is traditionally known to us as the iron age? The error, then, of Mr. Hunter is to confound the patriarchal with the iron age. It need not therefore cause surprise that in early Indian history we should hear of conflict, for it is just at the period and under the circumstances when we should consider the collision probable.

Mr. Hunter, indeed, speaks of the aboriginal races as mysterious in their origin. But from the point of view of Genesis, there seems to be no greater mystery about them than about their conquerors the Aryans. One representative, at least, of the aboriginal race, the Santals, retain to this day the most vivid traditions of the Flood and the Dispersion[33] (pp. 151, 452). Now, if there had existed any race anterior to the Santals, I think we should have heard of them. On this point we may consider Mr. Hunter’s negative testimony as conclusive, both on account of his extensive knowledge of the subject, and his evident predisposition (p. 109) to have discovered a prior race, if it had existed; and there is nothing to show that the same line of argument would not have applied to it if its existence had been demonstrated. It must be mentioned that besides their tradition of the dispersion, the Santals retain dim recollections—borne out by comparative evidence—of having travelled to their present homes from the north-east, whereas the Aryans came unmistakeably from the north-west.

Here, then, just as might have been predicted à priori, these rival currents of the dispersion met from opposite points, and ran into a cul de sac, from which, as there was no egress, there necessarily ensued a struggle for mastery.

Let us now regard the two people more closely.

“Our earliest glimpses of the human family in India, disclose two tribes of widely different origin, struggling for the mastery. In the primitive time, which lies on the horizon even of inductive history, a tall, fair-complexioned race passed the Himalaya. They came of a conquering stock. They had known the safety and the plenty which can only be enjoyed in regular communities.[34] They brought with them a store of legends and devotional strains; and chief of all they were at the time of their migration southward through Bengal, if not at their first arrival in India, imbued with that high sense of nationality, which burns in the heart of a people who believe themselves the depositary of a divine revelation. There is no record of the newcomers’ first struggle for life with the people of the land.”—Hunter’s Annals, p. 90.

Here we see the more intellectual, the more spiritual (p. 116), monotheistic (p. 115) Aryan race overpowering the black race which had earliest pre-occupied the ground, and which was already tainted with demon worship. This contrast invites further inquiry; but first let me clear up and direct the immediate drift of my argument.

If we estimate—taking the minimum or the maximum either according to the Hebrew or Septuagint version—the time it would have taken these populations, according to the slow progress of the dispersion, to have arrived at their destinations from the plain of Sennaar (Mesopotamia), the period may be equally conjectured to correspond with that which tradition marks as the commencement of the iron age, when the world was becoming overcrowded, and the increasing populations came into collision.

Neither is it a difficulty,[35] it rather appears to me in accordance with tradition, that if this surmise be correct, the earliest arrival in the Indian Peninsula should have been of those who took the longest route. For it is natural to suppose that the proscribed and weakest races, e.g. the Canaanitish, would have been the first to depart, and to depart by the north-east and west, the more powerful families having passed down and closed the south-east exit by way of the lower valleys of the Euphrates. These latter would have spread themselves out in the direction of India leisurely and at a subsequent period.

Following these lines of migration, the Aryan at some period came upon the black Turanian race (vide infra, [Chap. v.]); and Mr Hunter (p. 110) records the embittered feelings with which the recollection of the strife remained in tradition. Why should this have been? It might suffice to say, in consistency with what has already been advanced, that this was their first encounter, the first check in their advance.

Another solution seems to me equally ready to hand, and to solve so much more. But first, how does Mr Hunter account for this bitter feeling? He suggests contempt for their “uncouth talk,” “their gross habits of eating,” -will not this explain something of their animosity?

I must here remark that although scientific inquiry takes designations of its own, in order the more conveniently to express its distinctions, yet whether we accept the ethnological or philological demarcations of mankind, it is curious how inevitably, as I think De Maistre remarked, we are led back to Shem, Ham, and Japhet. And this is as true now after a half century of scientific progress, as it was when De Maistre wrote. Without asserting that the divisions may ever be distinctly traced with the minuteness of Bochart in his “Geog. Sacra,” I still say, that the broad lines of the traditional apportionment of the world, and the three-fold or four-fold division of the race indicated in Scripture, is seen behind the ultimate divisions into which science is brought to separate mankind, whether into Caucasian, Ethiopian, Mongol, with two intermediate varieties, as by Blumenbach; or into Australioid, Negroid, Mongoloid, and Xanthochroic, as by Huxley; or into Brace’s division into Aryan, Semitic, Turanian, and Hamitic. Behind these various systems, as behind a grill, we seem to see the forms and faces of the progenitors of the human race discernible, but their existence not capable of contact and actual demonstration, because of the intercepting bars and lattice work.[36]

I have spoken above of a three-fold and four-fold division as equally indicated in Scripture, and I think, from non-observance of this, the close approximation of these systems to Genesis is not sufficiently recognised. I refer to the three progenital races, and the Canaanite marked off and distinguished from the rest by a curse. I shall enlarge upon this point in another chapter ([Chap. v]).

I will only observe now that I do not venture to say that the Canaanite is co-extensive with the Turanian, which is more a philological than an ethnological division of mankind, or that their characteristics in all respects correspond.[37] I limit my argument now to indicating the correspondence between the Canaanite and the aboriginal tribes in India.

This correspondence I find not only in the features already noted—their blackness and their intellectual inferiority—but in their enslavement to the superior races of mankind whenever they came into contact and collision with them. Is not this everywhere also the mark of the Turanian race? are not these conflicts in primitive life always with the Turanian race? and are they not in Asia, as in Africa, in a state of subjugation or dependence?

At any rate, this is the condition in which we find the Turanian in India, so fully expressed in their name of “Sudras.”[38]

Against this literal fulfilment of Gen. ix. 25—“Cursed be Canaan, a servant of servants shall he be to his brethren”—as regards the Indian Sudra, the text in Gen. x. 19—“And the limits of Chanaan were from Sidon ... to Gaza ... even to Sesa”—may be objected. But I construe this text only to refer to Chanaan proper, and to be spoken rather with reference to the limits of the Promised Land and the Hebrews, than to the allocation of the tribes of Chanaan; for the text immediately preceding seems to me to have its significance—viz. Gen. x. 18,[39] where it is said in a marked manner, and of the descendants of Chanaan alone, “The families of the Canaanites were spread abroad.” But if we are to suppose the whole descent of Chanaan to have been confined between the limits of Sidon and Sesa, it could hardly have been said to have had the diffusion of the other Hamitic races, and the families of the Chanaanites will not have been “spread abroad” in any noticeable or striking manner. It appears to me, also, that it may be proved in another way. St Paul, Acts xiii. 19, says that God destroyed seven nations in the land of Chanaan, whereas Gen. x. enumerates eleven.

Again, Kalisch (“Hist. and Crit. Com. on Old Testament,” trans. 1858) makes it a difficulty against Gen. ix. that “Canaan should not only fall into the hands of Shem, i.e. the people of Israel, but also of Japhet” (i. 226).

A remote fulfilment of the prediction may be seen in the Median conquest of Phœnicia, and the Roman destruction of Carthage; but if I have truly indicated the order of events, it will be seen that it had already come about in the earliest times.

The text, indeed, of Gen. ix. 27—“May God enlarge Japhet, and may he dwell in the tents of Shem, and Canaan be his servant”—is so clear as almost to require some such fulfilment.

But the fulfilment is seen, not only in the degradation of Chanaan, but in the prosperity of Japhet;[40] and this is so correlative, that I shall still be enforcing the argument whilst connecting a link which may appear to be wanting, viz. the identity of Japhet with the more favoured nations of the world. The identity of the Indo-Germanic races with the descendants of Japhet may almost be said to be a truth “qui saute aux yeux,” but it may still be worth while to collect the links of tradition which establish it.

In truth, it appears to us a self-evident proposition, simply because tradition has familiarised us with the belief that Europe was peopled by the descendants of Japhet, and because philology has recently demonstrated the Indo-Germanic race to include this demarcation (together with Central and Western Asia); but I think that if we exclude the testimony of tradition, we should have difficulty in establishing the point either upon the text of Gen. x. 5, or from the evidence of philology.

That the race of Japhet spread themselves over the islands, and colonised the coasts of the Mediterranean, is the traditional interpretation of that text; and it receives confirmation, in the first place, in the tradition that “Japetus being the father of Prometheus, was regarded by the Greeks as the ancestor of the human race.”—Smith’s “Myth. Dict.” We have, I think, become familiar with such transpositions as “Deucalion the son of Prometheus,” and “Prometheus the son of Deucalion,” &c. Certainly Prometheus (vide Appendix to Chap. viii. [p. 180], and Chap. x. [p. 232]), supposing Prometheus to be Adam,[41] would naturally stand at the head of every genealogy; but Japetus, supposing him to be identified with Japhet as the particular founder of the race (after so distinct and definite a starting-point as the Deluge), would also, in his way, have claims to be placed at the head of their genealogy; and probably about the time that he began to be called “old Japetus,” and to be typical of antiquity, his claims would have been regarded as paramount, and Prometheus would have been accordingly displaced in his favour. This is conjectural, but must be taken as one link.

Well, the (Indian) Aryans also, according to Mr Hunter (“Rural Bengal,” 103), “held (Book of Manu and the Vishnu Purana) that the Greeks and Persians were sprung from errant Kshatryas, who had lost their caste”—i.e. from their own race. They are called in the same books Yavanas and Pahlavas. Now no one, I think, will call it a forced analogy to see in Yavana the name of Javan, the son of Japhet.[42] This I may call link the second.

But the Aryans, as we have seen, are one of the three or four primitive races to which both philology and ethnology lead us back. They are contrasted, on the one side, with the Semitic, and, on the other, with the Hamitic or Turanian race. We will assume, then, on the strength of the philological and scriptural lines being so nearly conterminous, that at least, looking from the point of view of Scripture, the Aryan may be identified with great probability as the Japhetic race. If, then, the Aryan is the Japhetic race in its elder branch—to which its later migration would seem to testify—we should exactly expect that it would designate a kindred but collateral race, not by the name of their common ancestor, but by the name of the progenitor from whom they were more immediately descended—not as from Japhet, but from Javan. Thus the links seem to join; and here I leave them, till there may chance to come some one who will gather up all the links in the chain of tradition, dislocated and dispersed by the catastrophes which have been consequent upon the derelictions of mankind.

The third view to which I wish to advert, is that put forward by Mr John F. M’Lennan in his “Primitive Marriage,” 1865, which also revives the theory of a savage state, and moreover professes to discover primitive mankind living in a state of promiscuity, little, if at all, elevated above the brute, and this during the long period which was required to develop 1. the tribe; 2. the gens; 3. the family.

It will be difficult for any one, who comes fresh from the perusal of Genesis, to realise the possibility of such a view being held; but, in truth, there is no view too grotesque for men in whose survey mankind appear originally on the scene as a mass of units coming into the world, no one knows how, like locusts rising above the horizon, or covering the earth perhaps like toads after a shower!

Yet Mr M’Lennan’s theory is virtually endorsed (vide infra) by Sir J. Lubbock, who refers to it (p. 60, note), as “Mr M’Lennan’s masterly work.” If, then, we must discuss the theory upon its merits, the objection which I should take, in limine, is that it is a partial generalisation from facts, irrespective of the historical evidence as a whole. There stands against it, of course, the direct evidence of the Bible, also there stands against it the researches of oriental archaeology, and, again, what Mr M’Lennan calls the “so-called revelation of philology,” which shows that mankind, in the period previous to their dispersion, “had marriage laws regulating the rights and obligations of husbands and wives, of parents and children.” This evidence he rejects because “the preface of general history must be compiled from the materials presented by barbarism” (p. 9), thus assuming barbarism to have been the primitive state.

Mr M’Lennan struggles vainly for universal facts on which to build, and seems to find one in what he has termed exogamy (i.e. marriage outside the tribe), combined with the capture of wives and the infanticide of female children within the tribe. Impossible! If this state of things had been universal, the human race would have exterminated itself long before “the historic period!” The theory necessarily supposes that some tribes were addicted to these practices, whilst others were not. Exogamy, therefore, is not a universal fact; but neither could endogamy have been, for “the conversion of an endogamous tribe into an exogamous tribe is inconceivable,” p. 146. But as Mr M’Lennan is as much constrained to choose between exogamy and endogamy as was Mons. Jourdain between poetry and prose, he apparently elects in favour of the universal primitive prevalence of exogamy, i.e. he supposes mankind to have commenced under conditions which would have ensured its proximate extinction.

Mr M’Lennan (p. 144) says, “the two types of organisation (viz. exogamy and endogamy) may be equally archaic;” but it is evident that he inclines to the opinion that exogamy is the more archaic; and his analysis at p. 142, commencing with “Exogamy Pure, No. 1, and continuing on to ... Endogamy Pure, No. 6,” is “the analysis of a series of phenomena which appears to form a progression” (141).

Moreover, the difficulties which I have just urged will immediately recur if we allow “the two types to have been equally archaic.”

The supposed exogamous tribes, according to the theory, enforcing the infanticide of female children, and not permitting marriage within the tribe, must have been wholly dependent upon the endogamous groups for their women. These latter groups must either have succumbed, and so have become speedily extinguished through the loss of their women (for they could not have acquired others who were not of their stock, without ceasing to be endogamous); or they must have resisted successfully, and even if the matter went no farther, the exogamous tribes must have died out or abandoned exogamy; or the endogamous tribes must have resisted and retaliated, in which case we should have this further complication that they themselves would have ceased to be endogamous, and without any reason or necessity for becoming exogamous; for with the seizure of the females of the exogamous tribes, or even, under the special circumstances, with the recovery of their own, the element of “heterogeneity” would have been introduced, and the system of endogamy would have been no longer true in theory, or possible in fact. All these results must have been immediately consequent upon the first collision, which from the very conditions of exogamy, must have occurred at the outset! Postulating exogamy, it must therefore rapidly have extirpated or absorbed every other system, and yet it could never have stood alone.

Mr M’Lennan himself allows that wherever “kinship through females, the most ancient system in which the idea of blood relationship was embodied” (148) was known, there would have been a tendency among the exogamous groups to become heterogeneous, and that thus “the system of capturing wives would have been superseded.”[43] In other words, exogamy would have become extinct. But if “kinship through females” was not discovered by the first children of the first mothers, how was it subsequently discovered? We are given no clue except that “the order of nature is progressive!”

This compels the remark that if Mr M’Lennan fails to prove that exogamy was universal, as a stage of human progress, or, to use a phrase of his own, “on such a scale as to entitle it to rank among the normal phenomena of human development,” there is nothing to exclude the likelihood of its being much more satisfactorily and directly traced as the result of degeneracy. Mr M’Lennan should clear his ground by demonstrating that the circumstances exclude the possibility of this conjecture.

On the contrary, and on his own showing, they would appear much more certainly to affirm it. Although exogamy is the earliest fact which he believes to be demonstrable by evidence, he assumes an initial promiscuity; and seems to see his way out of this initial promiscuity through the system of “rude polyandry” (when one woman was common to a determinate number of men unrelated) as distinguished from “regulated polyandry” (where one woman was common to several brothers). It must be noted that before these polyandrous families, if we may so call them, at first necessarily limited, could theoretically or in fact have become the tribal exogamous groups, many difficulties must be disposed of, and many stages traced, of which we are told nothing more than that we are “forced to regard all the exogamous races as having originally been polyandrous” (p. 226). That these families, if it is not an abuse of terms to call them so, could not have become tribal by grouping, Mr M’Lennan himself maintains, p. 232.

The two systems which Mr M’Lennan distinguishes as “rude” and “regulated polyandry,” are so essentially different that I fail to trace the possibility of progression from one to the other. “Rude polyandry” is barely distinguishable from promiscuity, and not at all if we regard it as only promiscuity, necessarily limited through infanticide, or other causes destroying the balance of the sexes. The latter has peculiar features—arising in some way out of, and fixed in the idea of the relationship of brothers—an idea which it is just conceivable might arise directly out of a state of promiscuity—where theoretically the children might be supposed to be in contact with the mother only, but which the system of “rude polyandry,” by introducing conflicting and complicated claims, would immediately tend to weaken and obliterate.

Let us see, then, if we can trace the custom better on the lines of degeneracy.

If we start with the belief in the existence of many primitive ceremonies and regulations we may then suppose that in the downward progression to promiscuity, the stages of the descent will be traceable in the corruptions of these customs. Such surmises at least are as good as the contrary surmises of Mr M’Lennan.

Now, we have already seen[44] that Mr M’Lennan alludes to the law of Deuteronomy, which imposed the obligation of the younger brother marrying the widow of the elder—and it will, moreover, be seen (Mr M’Lennan, p. 219) that this was also prescribed in the law of Menu.

Whatever may be the true solution of this coincidence the least likely account would seem to be that they had both, under different conditions (different at any rate from the point of divergence, be it exogamy or polyandry), advanced to it independently and by similar stages. Such fortuitous coincidences would imply not merely a succession of similar developments, but also a corresponding succession of accidental circumstances.

If, however, the custom of the younger brother marrying the widow of the elder was of primitive institution (compare Genesis xxxviii. and the Code of Menu), the corruption of this custom into polyandry, in circumstances which may at any time have disturbed the balance of the sexes in the overcrowded East, though it revolts will not absolutely astonish us; whereas the converse, i.e. restriction to successive appropriation contingent upon widowhood, from a state of virtual promiscuity, is so uphill a reform and so contrary to probability that it requires some internal evidence of the stages, and some warrant in modern observation to make it plausible. None are given. For the fact that we find both the “rude” and the “regulated” form existing side by side cuts both ways;[45] and the discovery of a form of capture—the Rakshasa, among the eight forms sanctioned by the code of Menu, enforces our argument—it would exactly correspond to the military exemption among the Jews (Mr M’Lennan, p. 82), supposing we were able to read Deuteronomy xx. 10–14 in the same sense as Mr M’Lennan. In that case, therefore, it would be a departure from or relaxation of a rule laid down—a view which is confirmed when we find that the authority quoted (Dr Muir, “Sanscrit Texts,” the Ramayana) tells that “Ravana, the most terrible of all the Rakshasas, is stigmatised as a destroyer of religious duties, and ravisher of the wives of others” (Prim. Mar. p. 309), which testifies to degeneracy at some period; whereas if Mr M’Lennan’s view is true, this hero must be relegated to a time when the conception of “religious duties,” and even of other men’s “wives” were unknown.

We have seen (supra, [46]), that when mankind had got, we know not how, into tribal exogamous groups, “kinship through females would have a tendency,” and a moment’s consideration will show an immediate tendency, “to render the exogamous groups heterogeneous, and thus to supersede the system of capturing wives.” We ask why did they capture wives? Mr M’Lennan implies that their ideas of incest forbade marriage within the tribe.[46] Apparently, then, the groups must have been exogamous[47] previously to the time when they had attained to the knowledge of “kinship through females,” else “kinship through females” would from the first have operated to produce a state of things which would have rendered exogamy unnecessary and inexplicable. The corollary is curious; they must, therefore, have had the idea of incest before they had the idea of kinship through females!

That some tribes should have arrived at some such state through a perverted traditional notion of incest, would, on the other hand, perfectly fit into the theory of degeneracy.

I had intended to have pursued this subject, but the chapter has already run to too great length. As allusion however, has been made to Sir John Lubbock, I append an extract (see [p. 47]) from which it will be seen that his view, although equally remote from historical truth, has a greater à priori probability. Indeed, if we could only consent to start on the assumption of “an initial state of hetairism,” nothing would be more complete than the following theory:—

“For reasons to be given shortly, I believe that communal marriage was gradually superseded by individual marriages founded on capture, and that this led firstly to exogamy, and then to female infanticide; thus reversing M’Lennan’s order of sequence. Endogamy and regulated polyandry, though frequent, I regard as exceptional, and as not entering into the normal progress of development. Like M’Lennan and Bachojen, I believe that our present social relations have arisen from an initial stage of hetairism or communal marriage. It is obvious, however, that even under communal marriage, a warrior who had captured a beautiful girl in some marauding expedition, would claim a peculiar right to her, and, when possible, would set custom at defiance. We have already seen that there are other cases of the existence of marriage, under two forms, side by side in one country, and that there is, therefore, no real difficulty in assuming the co-existence of communal and individual marriage. It is true that, under a communal marriage system, no man could appropriate a girl entirely to himself, without infringing the rights of the whole tribe.... A war-captive, however, was in a peculiar position, the tribe had no right to her; her capturer might have killed her if he chose; ... he did as he liked, the tribe was no sufferer.”—Sir J. Lubbock’s “Origin of Civilisation,” pp. 70, 71.

I will only ask one question. At what period does Sir J. Lubbock suppose the custom of inheritance through females arose? This as nearly approaches a universal fact as any which Sir J. Lubbock adduces (vide p. 105, et seq.); and, on the point of its having been a prevalent custom, I can have no difficulty. Whenever through degeneracy man arrived at the state of promiscuity or communal marriages, such inheritance as there might be, in such a community, would only be claimed through females, as the paternity would always be uncertain (vide infra, [p. 129]). If, however, mankind commenced with communal marriages, inheritance and relationship through females would also have been from the commencement.

Let us now turn to Sir J. Lubbock’s theory, as expressed in the extract above, in which he shows us how marriage by capture would quite naturally have arisen out of the state of communal marriage. But if natural, it would have been natural from the commencement, quid vetat? There must then have been a system also in operation from the commencement, the inevitable tendency of which, by making paternity distinct and recognisable, would have been to substitute inheritance through males; and this system, by introducing a more robust posterity, would rapidly have gained upon the other system. Male inheritance, it would then appear, commenced and established itself at the outset, and to the displacement of inheritance through females. How, then, do we find traces of the latter custom so prevalent? From this point of view the more instances Sir J. Lubbock accumulates, the more he will excite our incredulity and surprise.

This theory again, equally with Mr M’Lennan’s, supposes mankind originally in a state of hetairism, in which case it is futile to talk of tribes and of marriage out of the tribe; for how did they emerge into this tribal separation out of the state of promiscuity? The difficulty gets more complicated since, ex hypothesi, after emerging from, they still remain within the tribal limits, in the state of hetairism. These preliminaries must be settled before the argument can be carried further.

The usual philosophic formula is, of course, at hand—these changes must have required an indefinite lapse of ages! Into this swamp we shall see one philosopher after another disappear, leaving a delusive light behind him! If we could only, Dante like, recall one of these philosophers to life, after he has passed into his state of Nirvana, we would ask, as in this instance, why, supposing the state of promiscuity, it would require an indefinite lapse of ages to pass from it, according to the conditions of Sir John Lubbock’s argument (i.e. to the state of exogamy); considering that, vide supra, “it is obvious that, even under communal marriage, a warrior who had captured, &c, would claim a peculiar right to her, and, when possible, would set custom at defiance.” Clearly, then, it only required the man and the opportunity.

APPENDIX TO CHAPTER III.

The view at [p. 26] substantially coincides with the lines laid down by Blackstone (compare Plato; Grote’s Plato, iii. 337), which are the subject of Bentham’s attack, and to which the recent contributions of Sir Henry Maine to our knowledge in these matters would seem to run counter. Blackstone, “Comm.” i. 47, said— “This notion, of an actually existing unconnected state of nature, is too wild to be seriously admitted: and, besides, it is plainly contradictory to the revealed accounts of the primitive origin of mankind and their preservation two thousand years afterwards, both which were effected by the means of single families. These formed the first society among themselves, which every day extended its limits; and when it grew too large to subsist with convenience in that pastoral state wherein the Patriarchs appear to have lived, it necessarily subdivided itself by various migrations into more. Afterwards, as agriculture increased, which employs and can maintain a much greater number of hands, migrations became less frequent, and various tribes, which had formerly separated, reunited again, sometimes by compulsion and conquest, sometimes by accident, and sometimes, perhaps, by compact.... And this is what we mean by the original contract of society, which, though perhaps in no instance it has ever been formally expressed at the first institution of a state, yet, in nature, reason must always be understood and implied in the very act of associating together.... When society is once formed, government results, of course, as necessary to preserve and to keep that society in order ... unless some superior were constituted ... they would still remain in a state of nature.”

Bentham says of this passage from Blackstone, that “‘society,’ in one place, means the same thing as a ‘state of nature’ does: in another place, it means the same as ‘government.’ Here we are required to believe there never was such a state as a state of nature: then we are given to understand there has been. In like manner, with respect to an original contract, we are given to understand that such a thing never existed, that the notion of it is even ridiculous; at the same time, that there is no speaking nor stirring without supposing that there was one.”—Bentham’s “Fragment on Government,” p. 9 (London, 1823).

The previous and subsequent chapters ([ii.], [xiii.]), will be found to meet these strictures of Bentham, although not originally written with reference to them.

CHAPTER IV
CHRONOLOGY FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF TRADITION.

To many it may seem a fundamental objection that my theory supposes a chronology altogether out of keeping with modern discovery; and I fancy there is a somewhat general impression that modern science has an historical basis, to which not even the Septuagint chronology can be made to conform.

This really is not the case; but assuming it to be true, I must still remark, that if facts of primeval tradition have been established, the long lapse of ages will only enhance our notions of the persistency of tradition; or if the lapse of ages is disproved, this conclusion will be in recognition of a truth to which tradition testifies.

I shall now proceed to establish that the strictly historical testimony, and the direct historical evidence, is strikingly concurrent in favour of the scriptural chronology, allowing the margin of difference between the Hebrew and LXX. versions.[48]

With this view I shall successively examine the chronology of the principal nations whose annals profess to go back to the commencement of things—the Aryan (including the Indian, the Persian, the Greek, and the Roman), the Babylonian, the Chinese, Phœnician, and Egyptian. Indian Chronology.—There was a time when the Indian (Aryan) chronology was believed to attain to the most remote antiquity of all, and this belief was sustained by the apparently irrefragable testimony of astronomical evidence. Who upholds this evidence now? On this head I must refer to Cardinal Wiseman’s seventh lecture (“On Science and Revealed Religion”), where the reader will find a clear and careful precis of the discussion on the subject between Bailly and Delambre, the Edinburgh Review and Bentley, to which I am not aware that anything of consequence has to be added.

If, on the other hand, we turn to what I am exclusively directing my attention—the strict historical investigation—we find that the cautious inquiries of such men as Sir W. Jones and Heeren concur in placing the Aryan invasion at the antecedently very probable date, from the point of view of Scripture, of some 2000 years B.C.

At the present moment the discussion takes the form of philological inquiry, and into the antiquity (upon internal evidence) of the ancient Sanscrit literature. In so far, therefore, as it is philological, it belongs to the indirect argument, which I am now excluding. In so far as the Sanscrit literature is historical, I have discussed the testimony which it brings in the preceding chapter. Professor Rawlinson, however, in his recent “Manual of Ancient History,” refuses to discuss the question, as he does not regard the Maha-Bharata and Ramayana as “trustworthy sources of history,” and commences his Persian history with the accession of Cyrus, previously to which he does not consider the Aryan migration and settlement to have been completed. Apart, then, from the peculiar line of argument to which I shall presently refer, it would appear that the Indian chronology, as reconstructed from history and tradition, falls easily within the lines, not only of the LXX., but of the Hebrew version.

The Indians, it is true (“Hales’ Chron.,” i. 196), themselves say that their history goes back 432,000,000 years. Although Hales gives a solution which may be deemed satisfactory, I think that, if considered in connection with the Babylonian computation, it will be seen that, though inexact in their figure, they are accurate in their tradition. The primary figure in their (Indian) calculation—432,000—is arrived at through the extended multiplication of the Chaldean sossos, neros, and saros, or of their own traditional figures corresponding to them (vide infra). In the Chaldean system (vide Rawlinson, “Anc. Mon.,” i.), 6 and 10 were employed as alternate multipliers. Thus a “soss” = 60 years (10 × 6), a “ner” = 600 (60 × 10), a “sar” = 3600 (600 × 6); and if the multiplication be continued, the next figure would be 36,000 (3600 × 10), next 216,000 (36,000 × 6). The Indian figure 432,000,[49] is made up of twice 216,000.

Professor Rawlinson (“Anc. Mon.,” i. 192) gives in detail, and endorses a remarkable eclaircissement of M. Gutschmid on the mythical traditions of Assyrian chronology. Babylonian Chronology.—Rawlinson says—

“Assuming that the division between the earlier and later Assyrian dynasty synchronises with the celebrated era of Nabonassar (747 B.C.), which is probable, but not certain, and taking the year B.C. 538 as the admitted date of the conquest of the last Chaldæan king by Cyrus, he obtains for the seventh or second Assyrian dynasty 122 years (747 to 625). Assuming, next, that B.C. 2234, from which the Babylonians counted their stellar observations, must be a year of note in Chaldæan history, and finding that it cannot well represent the first year of the second or Median dynasty, since in that case eleven kings of the third dynasty would have reigned no more than thirty-four years, he concludes it must mark the expulsion of the Medes and accession of the third dynasty (which he regards as a native dynasty). From his previous calculations, it follows that the fourth dynasty began B.C. 1976; between which and B.C. 2234 are 258 years, a period which may be fairly assigned to eleven monarchs. This much is conjecture ... the proof now suddenly flashes on us. If the numbers are taken in the way assigned, and then added to the years of the first or purely mythical dynasty, we get 36,000, equal to the next term, to the sar (saros, vide supra), in the Babylonian system of cycles.”

It will be more apparent in the following table from Rawlinson, i.e.—

			Years.	B.C.
Mythical		86 Chaldæans	34,800
Historical		8 Medes	224	2458
		11 [Chaldæans]	(258)	2234
		49 Chaldæans	458	1976
		9 Arab	245	1518
		45 [Assyrian]	526	1273
		8 [Assyrian]	122	747
		6 Chaldæans	87	625
			36,000

Chinese Chronology.—The Chinese, also—though, be it observed, the Chinese of modern date, according to Klaproth (“Mem. Relatifs. à l’Asie,” i. 405; Klaproth places the commencement of the uncertain history of China 2637 B.C., the certain history 782 B.C.),[50] in the first year of our era, but more systematically in the ninth century—forged a mythological history, which carried the empire back 2,276,000 years (another calculation, 3,276,000). He adds, however, that the Chinese themselves do not consider the Wai-ki, the authority for these statements, to be historical.

Again, if we allow ourselves to be entangled in certain astronomical disputations, the question may become complicated and confused; but the astronomical discussion must depend, in the end, upon a point which history must determine—i.e. whether the astronomical knowledge and observations referred to had come down in primitive tradition, or had been imported at a later date. Although it need not exclude a belief in a tradition of primitive knowledge of astronomy, yet the doubt will ever cause a fatal uncertainty in any calculations, since, if the knowledge, or the knowledge of the particular observations and facts, had at any time been imported, they might have calculated back their eclipses, as has been proved to have been done in India.

Let us then, excluding the purely astronomical calculations, closely scrutinise the evidence which tradition affords; for if we can discover tradition of “appearances of rare occurrence, and which are difficult to calculate, such as many of the planetary conjunctions,” they “must,” as Baron Bunsen observes (“Egypt,” iii. p. 389), “either be pure inventions, or contemporary notations of some extraordinary natural phenomena.” Baron Bunsen proceeds to say:—“One instance that may be cited is the traditional observation of a conjunction of five planets (among which the sun and moon are mentioned), on the first day of Litshin, in the time of Tshuen-hiü, the second successor of Hoang-ti. Suppose this should have been the great conjunction of the three upper planets which recurs every 794 years and four months, and to which Kepler first turned his attention in reference to the year of the nativity of Christ. It took place in the following years.

The one which occurred in historical times was in November, seven years B.C.; consequently the conjunctions prior to it occurred in—

According to the official Chinese tables, as given by Ideler, he reigned from 2513 B.C. to 2436 B.C.; but the dates vary to the extent of more than 200 years, and the year 2375 comes within the limits of these deviations.”

Baron Bunsen, we may then assume, has very skilfully brought back Chinese chronology to within two generations of Hoang-ti (supra). If we could further identify Hoang-ti with Noah, two patriarchal generations would bring us close to the date of the Deluge as fixed by the Septuagint, if we referred them, in the first instance, to the death of Noah.

Before proceeding to this identification, I must point to another chronological fact in Chinese tradition, which would give to this identification an antecedent probability. It was stated (Bunsen, “Egypt,” iii. 383) that Hoang-ti established the astronomical cycle of 60 years in the sixty-first year of his reign.

At p. 387, Bunsen says: "The scientific problem thus offered for our solution is the following—It is admitted that the Chinese, from the earliest times, made use of a sexagesimal cycle for the division of the year = 6 × 60 days (360 days), and they marked the years by a cycle of 60 years, running concurrently with the cycle of days. This cycle, therefore, must have been originally instituted at a time when the first day of the daily cycle coincided with the first year of the annual cycle, i.e. when they commenced on the same day. Ideler thinks it impossible to ascertain this, owing to the irregularity of the old calendar." We may ask, then, what year that could be named would so exactly satisfy these conditions as the sixty-first year of the reign of Noah after the Deluge?[51] Let us, moreover, consider how traditional this cycle of sixty years has been (p. 386),—“Scaliger made the remark that the twelve yearly zodiacal cycle, which is in use among the Tartars (Mongols, Mandshus, Igurians), the inhabitants of Thibet, the Japanese and Siamese dated from the earliest times. Among the Tartaric populations, however, this is a cycle of sixty years (12 × 5); of the Indians we have already spoken.”

It will have already been seen that the cycle of sixty years entered into the Chaldean system—viz. cycle of 60 years = a sossos, 600 years = a saros, 3600 years = a neros.

“Now when we find (Bunsen, p. 387) that six hundred years gives an excess of exactly one lunar month, with far greater accuracy than the Julian year, such a cycle must have been indispensable when that of sixty years was in use, and consequently must have been employed by the Chinese, or, at all events, have been known to those from whom they borrowed the latter. Josephus also calls six hundred years the great year, which may have been observed by the patriarch.”

And at p. 407, in summing up the general chronological result, he says:—

“a. ... The earliest Chinese chronology rests upon a conventional basis peculiar to itself, that of limiting the lunar year by a cycle of six hundred years, which is common to the whole of North Asia and the Chaldeans; and probably (as it is also met with in India) to the Bactrians also: this basis is historical.” “b. The communication took place before the Chaldees invented the cycle of six hundred years.”

From our point of view, believing that the Chaldees never invented the cycle but held to it traditionally, the above conclusion must be construed to mean that the “communication,” or diffusion of the knowledge, must have taken place before the lapse of the first six hundred years after the Deluge, which will be further confirmed by conclusion c.

“c. The Chinese observation is based upon the Babylonian gnomon,”

which appears to me tantamount to the admission that it took place, in the plains of Mesopotamia, previous to the Dispersion.

In arriving, then, at the sixty-first year of the reign of Hoang-ti, we are led up to such close proximity to the epoch of the Deluge, that the presumption that Hoang-ti was Noah would be strong, even if no other evidence was at hand to corroborate it.

It is with this supplementary evidence that I now propose to deal.

Although the tradition of the Chinese is remarkably accurate, up to a certain point, yet in the period beyond that point, where the confusion is manifest, there is no reason why we should not expect to find the same reduplications and amalgamations of ante and post diluvian traditions, which we have already found in the history of other nations.

Without attempting to unravel all complications, let us turn again to Bunsen (iii. 382), and setting aside Pu-an-ku, the primeval man who came out of the mundane egg and lived eighteen thousand years, and who has resemblances with the Assyrian Ra and Ana, and the Egyptian Ra, the son of Ptha (to whom thirty thousand are allotted, vide infra, [p. 97–100]), and Sui-shin, “who discovered fire,” and who is the counterpart of Prometheus (vide [p. 180]). Regarding Pu-an-ku, the cosmical, and Sui-shin, as the mythical tradition of Adam, we come to the historical tradition in the person of Fohi.

“I. Fohi the great, the brilliant (Tai-hao) cultivator of astronomy and religion, as well as writing. He reigned one hundred and ten years. Then came fifteen reigns. II. Shin-nong (divine husbandman); institution of agriculture; the knowledge of simples applied as the art of medicine.” [Compare pp. 210–214, Saturn, Bacchus, Æsculapius.] “III. Hoang-ti (great ruler) came to the throne in consequence of an armed insurrection (new dynasty), and was obliged to put down a revolt. In his reign the magnetic needle was discovered; the smelting of copper for making weapons;[52] vases of high art, and money; improvement in the written character, said to be borrowed from the lines on the tortoise-shell. It consists of five hundred hieroglyphics, of which two hundred can still be pointed out. He established fixed habitations throughout his dominions, and the astronomical cycle of sixty years in the sixty-first year of his reign (vide supra, [61]); musical instruments. It was in his time also that the fabulous bird Sin appeared. The empire was considerably extended to the southward.”—Bunsen, 382.

If we take Fohi as Adam, the fifteen reigns which follow will bear analogy with “the fifteen generations of the Cynic cycle” (vide Palmer i. p. 8, 23–37; also vide infra), and will correspond to the thirteen generations, viz. the ten antediluvian, and the three survivors (excluding Noah) of the Deluge in the Egyptian chronology (vide infra). Shin-nong, “the divine husbandman,” will be Noah, and Hoang-ti, Shem or Ham, or else the two will be reduplicate traditions of Noah. Compare the attributions of Hoang-ti with those of Hoa in the Assyrian tradition, p. 239. Certain statements regarding him—e.g. that he suppressed an insurrection, accord more nearly with epithets applied to Nin, the fish-god, whom I have considered a duplicate of Hoa (p. 201), e.g. “the destroyer of enemies,”—“the reducer of the disobedient,”—“the exterminator of rebels.” Compare with the Phœnician tradition, p. 211, of Saturn causing the destruction of his son Sadid by the Deluge. The appearance of the fabulous bird Sin, seems a reminiscence of the birds sent out of the ark, which is so frequent in tradition. Compare the mystery bird (the dove) in the Mandan ceremonies,—the worship of the pigeon in Cashmere,[53] &c. Other coincidences might be pointed if space allowed.

But analogous to the double tradition of the Deluge in Assyria in the persons of Hoa and Nin; and, again, by a distinct channel of tradition in Xisuthrus (vide [pp. 208, 209]), as in China, there seems to have been a similar reduplication in China in their kings Hoang-ti and Yao or Yu.[54]

Now under this Yao or Yu, according to Chinese tradition (preserved, moreover, in the inscription of Yu), there happened the Deluge, or a Deluge. But as there is a confusion between Hoang-ti and Yao, so there is between Yao and Yu. Bunsen, however, admits these latter to be identical.

But although Bunsen asserts the authenticity of the inscription (as also does Klaproth), he utterly scouts the idea that it is a tradition of the Deluge, and maintains that it is itself evidence of a local inundation. Let us see.

“All the confusion or ignorance,” says Bunsen (398), “of the missionaries [in this matter], arises from their believing that this event referred to the Flood of Noah, which never reached this country.” And (p. 406), he says the inundation in the reign of Yao had just as much to do with Noah’s flood as the dams he created, and the canals he dug, had to do with the ark. This is said with reference to the “short Chinese account of it published by Klaproth,” viz.—

“In the sixty-first year of the reign of the Emperor Yao, serious mischief was caused by inundations. The emperor took counsel with the great men of the empire, who advised him to employ Kuen to drain off the water. Kuen was engaged upon it for nine years without success, and was condemned to be imprisoned for life. His son Yu was appointed in his stead. At the end of nineteen years he succeeded in stopping the inundation, and made a report to the emperor upon the subject.”

Let us turn, however, from this later gloss to the inscription itself, translated by Bunsen, p. 399—

“The Emperor said, ‘Oh thou Governor of the four mountains of the Empire!

The swelling flood is producing mischief;

It spreads itself far and wide;

It surrounds the hills, it overflows the dams;

Rushing impetuously along it rises up to Heaven:

The common people complain and sigh.’”

—Vide supra, p. 396.

“The venerable Emperor exclaimed with a sigh, ‘Ho assistant

Counsellor! the islands great and small up to the mountain’s top;

The door of the birds and of beasts, all is overflowed together—

Is swamped: be it thy care to open the way, to let off the water.’”

He then says:—

“My task is completed; my sacrifice I have offered in the second month, trouble is at an end, the dark destiny is changed; the streams of the south flow down to the sea; garments are prepared; food is provided; all the nations have rest; the people enjoy themselves with gambols and dancing.”—(Compare Commemorative Festivals, infra, [p. 249]).

I should have thought that all these phrases pointed much more to a universal Deluge than to a local inundation. But Bunsen says (398)—

“The fact is fully proved both by the inscription and the work of Yu itself. The inscription was on the top of the mountain, Yu-lu-fun, in the district of Shen-shu-lu. Owing to its having become illegible in early times, it was removed to the top of an adjoining mountain.” ... “The former locality tallies exactly with the very interesting description of the empire in the time of Yu, which we find at the opening of the second book of the Shuking.” And Bunsen concludes, “It may be presumed after this verification, that in future nobody will seriously doubt the strictly epic description of the Shuking in the Canon of Yu,” as above.

So far from being impressed by the discovery of the monument on the top of the local mountain, as evidence of the local deluge, I can see in it only a memorial of the universal Deluge localised; and I cannot help considering it in connection with the worship of the tops of mountains, of which we shall find traces elsewhere (p. 244–46). Surely Baron Bunsen proves too much, and describes to us a deluge which must have been on the scale of the universal Deluge for all countries below the level of the mountain Yu-lu-fun. But, let it be said, that this description, so accordant with the description of the flood, was merely Chinese exaggeration. I here wish to point out two curious coincidences. What if we shall find works similar of those to Yao or Yu, ascribed to the original founders in Egypt and Cashmere? As in the first instance, I shall have to quote from Baron Bunsen himself, I am surprised that the coincidence should have escaped his observation.

“This is the account given of Menes [the first king of Egypt] by Herodotus—Menes, the first king of Egypt, as the priests informed me, protected Memphis by a dam against the river which ran towards the sandy chain of the Libyan Mountains. About 100 stadia above Memphis, he made an embankment against the bend of the river, which is on the south side. The effect of this was to dry up its ancient bed, as well as to force the stream between the two chains of mountains. This bend of the Nile, which is confined within the embankment walls, was very carefully attended to by the Persians, and repaired every year. For, if the river were to burst through its banks and overflow at this point, all Memphis would be in danger of being swamped. Menes, the oldest of their kings, having thus drained the tract of land by means of the dyke, built upon it the city now called Memphis, which lies in the mountain valley of Egypt. To the west and north he dug a lake round it, which communicates with the river—on the east it is bounded by the Nile—and afterwards erected in it a temple to Vulcan, a splendid edifice, deserving of especial notice” (ii. 48).

Bunsen fully endorses this account—“Herodotus, therefore, has recorded the following fact, that before the time of Menes the Nile overflowed the tract of country which he fixed upon as the site of his new metropolis” (p. 49 and p. 51). “There is no foundation whatever for Andriossy’s hypothesis that the story originated in the fact of the Nile having once run westward from the Pyramid mountains to Bahr Bela Ma (stream without water) and the Natron and Mareotic Lakes. Herodotus mentions an historical fact, and describes the work of an historical king. Andriossy’s hypothesis, if well founded, would belong to geology.” A sagacious and well-founded remark on the part of Baron Bunsen, but, as I submit, equally applicable to the work of Yao or Yu.

Merely noting that, if the above work was really carried out by Menes, and it would have been, from the point of view of Genesis, so carried out at a period contemporary with that of Yao or Yu—and, moreover, conceding to it in any case (I mean the work of Menes) a certain historical basis—let us dispassionately compare both with the passage from Klaproth, which I shall now extract. It is taken from the Sanscrit History of Cashmere.[55]

Klaproth says:—

“The Hindoo history of Kashmir assures us that the beautiful valley which forms this kingdom was originally a vast lake, called Satisaras. This account is also agreeable to the local traditions of this country. It was Kasy’apa, a holy person who, according to the Hindoo historians, caused the waters which covered this valley to escape. He was the son of Marichi, the son of Brahma. The Mahometan writers call him Kachef or Kacheb, and many of them pretend that he was a god, or a genius, and servant of Soliman, under whose orders he effected the drying up of Kashmir. To execute this task he made, near Baramanleh, a passage across the mountains, through which the water passed.... The territory, recovered in this way by Kasy’apa, was also peopled by this holy man, with the assistance of the superior gods, whom he brought for this purpose from heaven, at the commencement of the seventh manwantara, or that in which we are now.” Klaproth adds:—“We must therefore suppose that Kashmir has been subjected to the same periodical revolutions as the other parts of the world, if we would reconcile this date with the ordinary chronology.”[56]

It must, I think, be conceded that we have now before us three very similar accounts of works undertaken with reference to the reclamation of inundated land. All are undertaken by the first founders of their respective kingdoms—kingdoms widely separated and inhabited by people of diverse race—and all, more or less, contemporaneously. The Egyptians and Kashmerian have points in common as to their mode of reclamation, whilst the Chinese and Kashmerian have still more in common with the narrative in Genesis.[57]

Four solutions occur to me as possible. Either they were obscure or perverted traditions of the Deluge, or their works were traditions of similar works effected by Noah after the Deluge; or these works were actually carried out upon the precedent and model of similar works effected by Noah; or they were fortuitous coincidences.

Upon either of the three former conclusions, it will be shown that traditions of the Deluge, direct or indirect, exist both in Egypt and China, where it has been so confidently asserted that no tradition is to be found; and in the latter case, what is more especially to my purpose, a tradition which brings Yao into relation with Noah and Hoang-ti.

In conclusion, I must remark that when it is urged that there is no tradition, or but slight tradition, of the flood in Egypt, we have a right to reply that there is no country where we should have so little reason to expect it. If there is any country where we should think it likely that the reminiscences of the Deluge would be effaced, it would be in a country periodically subject to inundations, where the people are annually made familiar with its incidents, and where its recurrence is not to them a cause of alarm, but a matter of expectation and joy.[58]

CHAPTER V
CHRONOLOGY FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF SCIENCE

Although the testimony of history is definite and decisive as to the chronology of the world, within the limits of a few hundred years, there is a general assumption, in all branches of scientific inquiry, that man must have existed many thousand years beyond the period thus assigned to him. Lyell speaks of “the vastness of time”[59] required for his development, and Bunsen, as we have seen, requires twenty thousand years, at least, between the Deluge and the nativity of our Lord: and wherefore this discrepancy? Because of a fundamental assumption—not merely hypothetical for the convenience of inquiry—but confident and absolute; an assumption which, so far as the argument is concerned, is the very matter in dispute—that man must have progressed and developed to the point at which we see him.

At the same time, the actual chronology cannot be altogether ignored, and some cognisance must be taken of the facts which history presents to us; and it is this unfortunate exigency, interrupting the placid course of development, which not unfrequently lands scientific inquirers of the first eminence in difficulties from which it will take an indefinite lapse of time to extricate them; ex. gra., Bunsen, in his “Egypt,” iii. 379, says—

“It has been more than once remarked, in the course of this work, that the connection between the Chinese and the Egyptians belongs, in several of its phases, to the general history of the world. The Chinese language is the furthest point beyond that of the formation of the Egyptian language, which represents, as compared with it, the middle ages of mankind,—viz., the Turanian and Chamitic stages of development.”

The conclusion of philology (vide also Brace’s “Ethnology,” p. 114) is, therefore, that the Turanian or Chamitic grew out of the more inorganic and elementary Chinese.

Now, let us compare Lyell’s conclusions with Bunsen’s. Lyell equally believes (“Principles of Geology,” ii. 471) “that three or four thousand years is but a minute fraction of the time required to bring about such wide divergence from a common parent stock, ‘as between’ the Negroes and Greeks and Jews, Mongols and Hindoos, represented on the Egyptian monuments.”

At the same time, he endorses Sir John Lubbock’s view, and pronounces, upon what appears to me very light and insufficient grounds (ii. 479), that “the theory, therefore, that the savage races have been degraded from a previous state of civilisation may be rejected:” and by implication that the civilised races have progressed from the savage state may be affirmed.[60]

I have, then, only to assume one point that Sir C. Lyell will concede, the order of progress or development to have been from black to white, and that he will pay us the compliment of being the more favoured race.