PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 611 
have never seen in our own generation,’ he says, ‘ indeed the world has not seen 
more than once or twice in all the course of history, a literature which has 
exercised such prodigious influence over the minds of men, over every cast and 
shade of intellect, as that which emanated from Rousseau between 1749 and 
1762. It was the first attempt to re-erect the edifice of human belief after the 
purely iconoclastic efforts commenced by Bayle, and in part by our own Locke, 
and consummated by Voltaire; and besides the superiority which every con- 
structive effort will always enjoy over one that is merely destructive, it possessed 
the immense advantage of appearing amid an all but universal scepticism as to 
the soundness of all foregone knowledge in matters speculative, . . . The great 
difference between the views is that one bitterly and broadly condemns the 
present for its unlikeness to the ideal past, while the other, assuming the present 
to be as necessary as the past, does not affect to disregard or censure it.’ 
I have devoted some space to these first steps of Linguistic Paleontology and 
Comparative Jurisprudence because the method of inquiry which they announced 
promised at first sight to make good a very serious defect in the instruments 
of anthropological research. Human history, outside of Europe and of one 
or two great Oriental States like China, hardly went back beyond living 
memory ; even Mexico had no chronicles beyond the first few hundred years, 
and the records of old-world States like China, which at first sight offered 
something, turned out on examination to have least to give. They had lived 
long, it is true, but their lives had been ‘childlike and bland,’ devoid of change, 
and almost empty of experience. Consequently there was no proof that the 
‘wild men’ of the world’s margins and byways were really primitive at all. 
The Churches held them children of wrath, degenerate offspring of Cain; the 
learned fell back upon pre-Adamite fictions to palliate, rather than to explain, their 
invincible ignorance of Europe and its ways. Here, however, in the new light 
thrown by the history of speech, there seemed to he a prospect of deep insight into 
the history of humansocieties. Disillusionment came in due course when doctors dis- 
agreed; but illusion need never have taken the form it did, had either the philo- 
logists or the philosophers realised that all the really valuable work was being done 
within the limits of a single highly special group of tongues ; that: the very cir- 
cumstance that this group of tongues had spread so widely, pointed to some strong 
impulse driving the men who spoke them into far-reaching migrations; that one 
of the few points upon which linguistic paleontologists were really unanimous 
was that both the Indo-European and the Semitic peoples, in their primitive 
condition, were purely pastoral; and that this pastoral habit was itself an almost 
coercive cause for their uniformly patriarchal organisation. The last point, 
however, belongs so completely to another phase of our story that it is almost an 
anachronism to introduce it here. It serves however to indicate, once again, if 
that be necessary, how completely the philosopher, and even the man of science, 
is at the mercy of events in the ordering of his search after knowledge. It is, 
indeed, almost true to say that if the primitive Aryan had not had the good fortune 
not merely to live on a grass-land, but also to find domesticable quadrupeds there, 
there could no more have been a science of comparative philology in modern 
Europe, than there could be among the natives of your own Great Plains or of 
the Pacific Coast : for in no other event would there have been any such ‘family 
of languages’ to compare. 
In the absence of warning thoughts like these, however, the comparative 
philology and the comparative law of the patriarchal peoples of the North-West 
Quadrant and of India went gaily on. What Maine had done for India, Maine 
himself, with Solm and von Maurer, in Germany; Le Play, de Laveleye, and 
d’Arbois de Joubainville in France; W. F. Skene in far-off Scotland; Whitley 
Stokes and others in Ireland; Rhys in Wales; and Mackenzie Wallace and 
Kovalevsky in Russia, had done for the early institutions of their respective 
countries: all emphasising alike the wide prevalence of the same common type of 
social structure, based upon the same central institution, the Patriarchal Family, 
with the Patria Potestas of its eldest male member as its overpowering bond of 
union; and Maine’s own words do not the least exaggerate the beliefs and 
expectations which were evoked by this new aspect of the Study of Man. 
RR2 
