TOWARDS A THEORY OF LIFE 1399 



on environment; that is to say, in human terms, folk act and react 

 with their place. The life-process then, in principle, as Herbert 

 Spencer and others long ago have seen, is like the reflex action, in 

 which environmental stimulus evokes response; and this normally 

 with some effect on environment in turn, as our being in life is 

 readily recognised by our breathing; in which each inspiration from 

 our air environment is at once maintaining our tissue-life yet so 

 far also burning it away; and each expiration being that of a now 

 modified atmospheric content, poorer in oxygen, richer in carbon 

 dioxide and water-vapour; much as with a cooking- fire or a 

 blast-furnace. So in the world of social life is stimulus and response ; 

 as from fruit we pull, from stone we grip, and shell we break, to 

 modern elaborations of technology. And as "the dyer's hand is 

 subdued to what he w^orks in", so for every simpler or more developed 

 occupation, and this for family too, woman and child as well as 

 man; for as the hunter must have hands free to shoot and limbs 

 free to run, the squaw carries the burden. Their hard (and most 

 readily warlike) life is comparatively short; but with flocks to herd 

 and milk, and wool to spin and weave, the long-lived, leisured, and 

 often truly cultured pastoral family arises ; and its caravan develop- 

 ments as well. The poor peasant has a strenuous life, and his wife 

 with him; whence economy, even to her filling "le bas long", which 

 is the appropriate French popular name for the Bank of France, as 

 "the old lady of Threadneedle Street" for the Bank of England. 

 In more prosperous agriculture, the best farmers, as Le Play told 

 his students long ago, are essentially "those that have the best 

 wives". In the sea-fishing life, the fish- wife not only baits the line, 

 but takes the fish to homes or market; whence an historic and 

 cumulative factor — more important than either feminists or their 

 critics have noticed, or may admit — of the active origin, and earliest 

 success, of the political claims of women in the maritime countries, 

 towns, and cities of Western Europe. Turning now to custom and 

 law, we see the varied conditions of land- tenure fundamentally 

 explained by the peasant's division of land among his sons; while 

 Norman inheritance by primogeniture is not a little explained from 

 the necessary maritime hierarchy of father and sons, in their order 

 of age and experience, and with indivisibility of the boat, and its 

 authority alike, for which the eldest son — as "first mate" of most 

 experience — is normally the best fitted. And so again, for the great 

 difference of Western law, as individualistic, from that of Hindus 

 and Chinese as more collective, with much of family ownership. 

 These are respectively determined by the staple cultures, of wheat 

 and rice respectively; the first, with ploughing, etc., so essentially 

 individual, the other so fully commumtary, since from general 

 water-supplies to planting and harvesting. So again as to the long 

 terms of imprisonment for crime, so long characteristic of Mediter- 



