PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 605 
Therefore there arise laws, in the relations in which these nations stand to one 
another; and these are the ‘ Law of Nations’—the Jus Gentium. ‘ All peoples 
have a law of nations. Even the Iroquois, who eat their prisoners, have one. 
They send and accept embassies, they recognise laws of war and laws of peace. 
The only trouble is that ¢his law of nations is not founded on the right 
principles,’ 
Here, then, as was by this time inevitable for a Frenchman, Montesquieu is 
once more face to face with the Iroquois. Their ‘Law of Nations,’ it is true, ‘is 
not founded on the right principles’; but a law of nature they have got; and 
this is his proof that there 7s a law of nature. But clearly he only proves this 
if we are to assume that the Iroquois are in the state of nature; or at any rate 
so near to it as to be a fair sample of what human behaviour would be, 
untrammelled by any positive or non-natural law. 
Montesquieu, therefore, like his predecessors, not only takes full account of 
recorded observations of barbarous peoples, but is directly and specifically guided 
in his argument by the ‘last new thing’ in current anthropology, the Iroquois of 
French Canada, as revealed by Lafitau in 1724. 
Rousseau. 
Rousseau, I need hardly say, remains something of a puzzle. Like his pre- 
decessors, he comes at the subject of the State of Nature, in the first instance, as a 
reformer and a political philosopher; and I am bound to say that it is only in 
proportion as he feels the need of illustration, and realises that his whole case is 
hypothetical, that he is driven back upon ethnology as an ornament of style and 
as a makeshift for proof. Unlike his predecessors, however, he cannot be given 
credit for great learning on the point at issue, and he frankly admits as much :— 
‘As we know so little of Nature and agree so ill as to the meaning of the word 
Law, it would be difficult to settle on a good definition of the Law of Nature.’ 
There was, however, a great deal known about ‘Nature’ in 1753 which was not 
in Rousseau’s philosophy. Yet he had clearly read travels, as everyone did in 
those days, and he reproduces a few details as to the qualities and customs of 
savages. 
He quotes Peron’s ‘ Voyages aux Terres Australes’ for the comparative strength 
of Europeans and Tasmanians, and illustrates sensory acuity from Hottentots 
and Redskins; but his favourite type is the Carib, whom we have already met in 
discussing Defoe. It is the ‘Carib of Venezuela’ who shows such surprising 
skill in tackling wild animals; it is, too, ‘the inhabitant of the banks of the 
Orinoco,’ who learned the use of ‘those boards which he applies to the temples of 
his children, and which assure to them at least part of their natural idiocy and 
happiness.’ It is the ‘Carib’ again who ‘sells his cotton mattress in the morning 
and comes with tears in the evening to buy it back, for lack of foresight that he 
was going to want it for the coming night,’ and whose happiness is, nevertheless, 
So quaintly compared with that of a European Minister of State. There is a 
curiously Amazonian flavour, meanwhile, about Rousseau’s sketch of the primitive 
family. ‘The most ancient of all societies, and the most nearly natural, is that 
of the family. But even here the children do not stay bound to the parent any 
longer than they need him for their own maintenance. As soon as this need 
ceases, the natural tie dissolves. The children, released from the obedience 
which they owed to the father, the father released from the care which he owed 
to the children, all return equally to independence. This common liberty is a 
consequence of human nature.’ Such an analysis is, of course, only true in fact 
under the conditions of a tropical forest. Nowhere else does the family tie break 
down in the way Rousseau describes; and nowhere was this type of social 
anarchy more open to study than in the equatorial forests of South America. 
Whence did Rousseau acquire his conception of the Carib? The most obvious 
source would be the seventeenth volume of the Abbé Prévost’s‘ Histoire Générale 
des Voyages, which contains a full summary of the ‘Origin, Character, and 
Customs’ of the Caribs, and a narrative of European colonisation of the Antilles; 
but this volume does not seem to have been published till 1761. Raynal’s ‘Histoire 
Philosophique et Politique des Etablissements et du Commerce des Européens 
