542 WAS PRIMITIVE MAN A MODERN SAVAGE? 



known — passing upward through incessant centuries of savage war- 

 fare in which each worse stage has been succeeded by a better, all fiud- 

 ing their reflex and counterpart in the grim and bloody record of the 

 anthropologist, which has in it many savage infernos but no primeval 

 Eden. 



This conception of the beginnings of human society rests to-day on 

 the uniforinitarian view that the savage of the youth does not materi- 

 ally differ from the savage of the maturity of the race. The earliest 

 savage of the past is assumed to be like the lowest savage of to-day, 

 and the well-nigh universal assumption is that the origin and only 

 origins of human institutions must be sought in tribes engaged in a 

 perpetual warfare with those about, cannibal in their habits, in their 

 religious conceptions the prey of the terror-stricken animism of the 

 savage, as we know him, in their sexual relations given to exogamons 

 marriages by capture or to endogamous marriages sprung from com- 

 munal maternity, both bestial, below the larger mammals and birds, 

 among whom a fairly loyal monogamy not unusually exists. The foun- 

 tain of government is to be found, and found alone, in a matriarchate 

 which implies fugitive paternal relations or a patriarchate which was 

 always the precursor of and was usually accompanied by polygamy. 

 Out of this dark background of war, rapine, robbery, rape, fornication, 

 and incest, by pathways as dark of idolatry, polytheism, polygamy, and 

 slavery, we are asked to believe that man slowly developed into mono- 

 theism, monogamy, the family, freedom, equality, aud law. The con- 

 trast between the origin and end of this human pilgrim's progress must 

 have often struck the candid observer. The difficulty may lie in the 

 facts. It may lie in the theory. If in the latter, it will not be the first 

 time that the real obstacle to acceptance has been, not in the facts, 

 which, accurately stated, always explain themselves, but in the theory 

 which is presented in the name of science, but is, as all mere theory must 

 be, the badge of ignorance and the open proof that the facts are not yet 

 fully known. 



Of the existence of cannibalism, for instance, as a fact on the part 

 of prehistoric man, in some quarters aud places, there can be no 

 reasonable doubt. Whether this single habit was in the first place 

 universal, in the second place primitive, and in the third place connoted, 

 all that in the modern savage accompanies cannibalism is a matter of 

 inference in the present state of our knowledge. There is no question 

 that certain representatives of prehistoric man, living miserable lives 

 in caves, at or near the close of the glacial epoch, in a region where 

 the struggle of life was severe, were cannibals. This is also true of 

 very early man in more favorable conditions in Southern Egypt and 

 of early remains in Japan, a region where, as in l^orth Europe, subsis- 

 tence must have been difficult under primitive conditions. Whether 

 in friendlier parts of the temperate zone, farther on one side from the 

 Arctic Circle and on the other from the Tropic of Cancer, cannibalism 



