PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 615 
of his ‘ Doctrine of the Geographical Provinces’ in 1886! that he touched on 
this precise ground, and by that time Ratzel’s ‘ History of Man’ had already been 
out for a year.” 
Epilogue. 
These examples, I think, are sufficient to show how intimately the growth of 
political philosophy has interlocked at every stage with that of anthropological 
science. Each fresh start on the never-ending quest of Man as he ought to be has 
been the response of theory to fresh facts about Man as he is. And, meanwhile, 
the dreams and speculations of one thinker after another—even dreams and 
speculations which have moved nations and precipitated revolutions—have ceased 
to command men’s reason when they ceased to accord with their knowledge. 
And we have seen more than this. We have seen the very questions which 
philosophers have asked, the very problems which perplexed them, no less than 
the solutions which they proposed, melt away and vanish, as problems, when the 
erspective of antbropology shifted and the standpoint of observation advanced, 
his is no new experience ; nor is it peculiar either to anthropology among the 
natural sciences, or to political science among the aspects of the Study of Man. 
It is the common law of the mind’s growth, which all science manifests, and all 
philosophy. 
And now I would make one more attempt to put on parallel lines the course of 
anthropology and of political thinking. It is not so very long ago that a great 
British administrator, returning from one of the gravest trials of statesmanship which 
our generation has seen, to meet old colleagues and class-mates at a college festival, 
gave it to us as the need he had most felt, in the pauses of his administration, that 
there did not exist at present any adequate formulation of the great outstanding 
features of our knowledge (as distinct from our creeds) about human societies and 
their mode of growth, and he commended it to the new generation of scholarship, 
as its highest and most necessary task, to face once more the question: What 
are the forces, as far as we can know them now, which, as Aristotle would have 
put it, ‘maintain or destroy States’ ? 
But if a young student of political science were to set himself to this life work, 
where could he turn for his facts? What proportion of the knowable things 
about the human societies with which travellers’ tales and the atlases acquaint 
him could he possibly bring into his survey, without a lifetime of personal 
research in every quarter of our planet ? 
I have in mind one such student setting out this coming session to investigate, 
on the lines of modern anthropology, the nature of Awthority and the circum- 
stances of its rise among primitive men; and the difficulty at the outset is pre- 
cisely as I have described. In the case of the ‘ black fellows’ of Australia such a 
student depends upon the works of some four or five men, representing (at a 
favourable estimate) one-twentieth even of the known tribes of the accessible 
parts of that continent. For British South Africa he would be hardly better 
served; for British North America, outside the ground covered in British Columbia 
by Boas and Hill-Tout, he would have almost the field to himself; and the pro- 
spect would seem to him the drearier and the more hopeless when he compared 
it with things on the other side of the forty-ninth parallel. ; 
Now, our neighbours south of that line have the reputation of being practical 
men; in other departments of knowledge they are believed to know well ‘ what 
pays.” And I am forced to believe that it is because they know that it pays to 
know all that can still be known about the forms of human society which are 
protected and supervised from Washington, that they have gone so far as they 
have towards rescuing that knowledge from extinction while still there is time. 
The Bureau of Ethnology of the United States of America is the most systematic, 
the most copious, and, I think, taking it all in all, the most scientific of the public 
agencies for the study of any group of men, as men. The only other which can be 
compared with it is the ethnographical section of the last census of India, and that 
1 Bastian, Zur Lehre von den geographischen Provinzen. Berlin, 1886. 
? Ratzel, Volkerkunde (Leipzig, 1885). His method is best studied in the first 
volume of his Anthropo-geographie (Leipzig, 1882). 
