CH. xvm.] THE EVOLUTION OF SOCIETY. 195 



metaphysical habit of regarding it as a necessary attribute of 

 humanity, are equally unsound and equally fraught with 

 error. Until more accurate conceptions are acquired, no 

 secure advance can be made toward discerning the true 

 order of social changes. Far from being necessary and 

 universal, progress has been in an eminent degree contingent 

 and partial. Its career has been frequently interrupted by 

 periods of stagnation or declension, and wherever it has 

 gone on, it has been forwarded, not by an inexplicable ten- 

 dency or nisus, but by a concurrence of favourable con- 

 ditions, external and internal. We must remember more- 

 over, as Sir Henry Maine reminds us,^ that the communities 

 which have attained to a conspicuous degree of civilization 

 constitute a numerical minority of mankind. Contempora- 

 neous with the rapidly advancing nations of Europe exist 

 the sluggish nations of Asia, and the almost stationary tribes 

 of Africa and Polynesia, 



"Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.* 



So irregular, indeed, has been the march of civilization, that 

 most stages of progress may be made the subject of oculai 

 investigation at the present day. 



In the science of history, therefore, old "means not old 

 in chronology, but in structure : that is most archaic which 

 lies nearest to the beginning of human progress considered 

 as a development, and that is most modern which is farthest 

 removed from that beginning." ^ 



]!^'evertheiess, in spite of the fact that the career of progress 

 has been neither universal nor unbroken, it remains entirely 

 true that the law of progress, when discovered, will be found 

 to be the law of history. The great fact to be explained is 



from a superhuman instructor." (!) Whately's Rhetoric, p. 94. A statement 

 not altogether compatible with the one just quoted from the same author in 

 the tex\. 



^ Ancient Law, p. 24 ; cf. Lewis, Methods of Observation in Politios, Tol. i. 

 p. 302. 



* M'Leuiiiin, Primitive Marriage, p. 9. 



2 



