THE EVOLUTION OP MORAL CODES 87 



war, when union and concert were necessary. But 

 slowly they acquired an application to times of peace, 

 and eventually became the unwritten and then the 

 written law of the races. They made permanent 

 society possible. The origin of society was thus the 

 appearance of restrictive laws that regulated the 

 relations of different families. 



These two classes of regulations from the begin- 

 ning till to-day have had different foundations. 

 Family customs, though perhaps more or less 

 founded upon fear of the results of disobedience, 

 have been very largely based upon sympathy and 

 love. The willingness of the parent to yield his inter- 

 ests to those of his child, and the child's obedience to 

 his parents, have arisen from mutual interest and 

 feelings of affection. But the primitive laws that 

 regulated external relations had nothing to do with 

 these gentler principles. They were devised solely 

 to reduce the evils that arose from the natural law 

 of retaliation and were forced upon man by the neces- 

 sity of making as firm unions as possible. If the 

 notion of right and wrong entered into the question 

 of relations within the family, a question which we 

 must consider presently, it is certain that ideas of 

 right and wrong had, at first, nothing to do with the 

 formulation of laws. No conception of right or 

 wrong, of justice or injustice entered into the formu- 

 lation of the rules regulating families. The reason 

 why one family in the primitive condition of man- 

 kind demanded retaliation for an act of violence was 

 not because of the wrong done, but because of the 

 injury received. This is abundantly proved by a 

 host of facts. Early law, for example, recognized no 

 distinction between intentional injury and accident. 



