LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
SIR HENRY MAINE AND MR. M'LENNAN.
go THE EDITOR OF THE "SFROTATOR.1 Sin,—The reviewer in the Spectator of Mr. M'Lennan's "Studies in Ancient History " appears to agree with Mr. M'Lennan in think- ing that he has a right to a reply from me. May I be permitted to say that I do not understand on what grounds this demand is made. Mr. M'Lennan does not in anywise deny the existence of the institutions which I profess to discern on the threshold of civilisation ; on the contrary, he fully accepts my account of them. But he alleges that he has discovered institutions still older, principally through observation of the practices of savage men. It may be so ; but Mr. M'Lennan or the reviewer puts a very strained construction on a few pages of a book of mine published sixteen years ago, if he supposes me to have under- taken to maintain, on all occasions and against all comers, that Patriarchal Power and Agnatic Relationship had no antecedents.
I think myself entitled to sayno more at present of Mr. M'Lennan's speculations than that, though they have greatly interested me, they have not convinced me. Your reviewer passes lightly over one of the chief difficulties which I, at all events, experience. It may be taken as demonstrated that a portion of mankind, in- cluding several of the now or lately savage races, have suffered at some period or other of their tribal development from an inferiority in number of women to men, and that this inferiority has left its mark on their institutions. But in order to establish Mr. M'Lennan's comprehensive theory, it is necessary to assume that the preponderance of males over females was once universal, and that it universally arose from the slaughter of female infants. I find it very hard to believe this, and so, I observe, do Sir John Lubbock and Mr. Herbert Spencer. The loss of women by cap- ture, which your reviewer regards as a partial cause of the dis- arrangement of the natural balance of the sexes, appears to me likely to have been a much more powerful cause than infanticide; since there is a' great deal of evidence, part of which is noticed by Mr. M'Lennan, that amid the incessant wars of the ancient world women were as much the spoil of victory as cattle or treasure. But the disturbance of the balance of the sexes thus produced would of course be a disturbance both ways, one group losing and another gaining. I cannot see why the more success- ful races or tribes should not have been saved by their very success from such institutions as polyandry, and from such usages as the so-called "Lycian " custom of reckoning kinship exclu- sively through females ; and it is from the successful races that our own institutions have descended to us. It cannot be too carefully recollected that the civilised races are the successful races, and the savage races, on the whole, the unsuccessful.
As your reviewer refers to my attempted solution of the ex- tremely obscure problem presented by the constitution of the ancient Irish family, perhaps I may be allowed to supply here a reference which is wanting in my "Early History of Institutions." The passage of the Brehon law in which it is implied that the father had the "power of pronouncing judgment, and proof, and witness" over his sons occurs in Vol. II. of the official edition of the "Ancient Laws of Ireland," at p. 349, line 3 from the foot. I find from my notes that the statement appears in a more direct form in the tracts translated, but not as yet published.—I am, Sir, &c.,
Previous page
