him if the gleam of light he is enabled to shed on this comparatively untravelled path, though in truth no better than a glimmer, be yet strong enough to mark the way for others, who may hereafter, with greater qualifications, be induced to tread it.

CHAPTER II.

OTHER FORMS OF LABOUR ORGANISATION

Prehistoric Times-The Patriarchal Age-Village Communities-Despotism -The Tribal System-Slavery-Serfdom-Hereditary Trades-CasteGuilds-The Municipal System-The Manorial System-The Feudal System-Free Industry-Competition-Capital and Labour.

PREHISTORIC TIMES.

LESS than fifty years ago the inhabitants of the civilised world believed, and were satisfied with the belief, that mankind's genealogy on earth did not extend further back than six thousand years or thereabouts. Since then a complete revolution has occurred in all educated conceptions of this matter. An extraordinary series of successful investigations has revealed the existence of an older world, inhabited by now extinct races of men, the remains of whose handiwork are found alike in the soil we till, and under the sites of the cities we people. It has been proved, as certainly as anything can be proved, that ages before the earliest light that history sheds upon the past, men and women, in all material respects similar to ourselves, occupied the countries we now occupy-lived, died, were buried and left descendants, where we live, love, and die to-day. No direct knowledge of these former races reaches us from the oldest traditions of the earliest time. They have left no voluntary records of themselves. All our knowledge of them is derived from their skeletons and tools, and the bones of animals on which they fed, relics that are occasionally discovered in the caves that were used as places

of refuge, and under the gravels and clays that now cover their hunting and fishing resorts. The antiquity of some of these remains cannot be less than fifty thousand years, and is probably often much greater.1 The fashioning of the rude flint and bone implements thus discovered was presumably the earliest manufacture in the world. Of the system of

2

industry which produced them it is impossible of course to give any accurate description. With the aid of analogy, however, and by the light of the most recent discoveries in anthropology a fair conception of it may be formed. The earliest condition of man is now generally believed to have been, not one of savage isolation, as has been often assumed; still less of innately acquired civilisation afterwards tending to decay, as has also been contended; but of gradual evolution from very variously constituted family groups. "Mankind," says Mr. Tylor, I can never have lived as a mere struggling crowd, each for himself; "4 and equally

3

certain it is that no member of the human family has ever appeared on earth clothed in the full panoply of letters, arts, and language-like Minerva springing from the brain of Jupiter. Population must at all times have been first made up of family groups or households, consisting at the least of a single pair and their descendants; but also more usually perhaps being of some more complicated structure. Such family groups in an almost endless variety of structural complication are still found all over the world. Into most of them the conception of property sooner or later forces itself, whether property in chattels, cattle, or land; whether

1 The Great Ice Age, by James Geikie, F.R.S., second edition, revised 1877, p. 436 (Ed. Stanford). Primitive Man, by Louis Figuier, Introduction. (Chatto and Windus, 1876). The Human Species, by A. De Quatrefrages; International Scientific Series, third edition, chaps. xii. and xiii.

2 By Rousseau, for instance, and his school.

By the school of which Dr. Whately was perhaps the best known disciple.

4 Anthropology, p. 402.

of a personal or family kind; and this is the first step towards industrialism. The next is when barter is developed. The members of the group learn to exchange their superfluities with one another for other objects which they desire to possess. This step is one that man only among animals is known to take. An extended system of exchange leads to trade, which presupposes manufacture; and the considerable organisation of labour that this implies has been generally held to portend a much advanced stage of human development. Sir Charles Lyell, however (Antiquity of Man), believed himself to have discovered the undoubted traces of a "manufactory" of stone implements near Berne in Switzerland; and if the reality of that discovery be allowed, we see in how primitive a stage of progress organised production may occur. We can thus picture to ourselves the prehistoric conditions of human labour. Family groups roam over the surface of the earth in search of food, sheltering themselves as best they can in some cave or fissure; and here and there these groups gather together into communities more or less organised; even at length so highly organised as to own property, and carry on a primordial trade and manufacture.

Anthropologists divide the earliest industrial epoch, which they call the Stone Age, into two periods, the Palæolithic and Neolithic, or the eras of rough and polished stone implements. Such eras are of course not epochs of history, but of progress. To these succeed in their classification the Bronze and Iron Ages respectively in the former of which we first make historic acquaintance with the Greeks, who are just emerging from it in Homeric times. At some period during the Stone Age the manufacture of earthenware, they say, began; and at a later date

1 See also Primitive Man, chap. vi. Regular workshops of primitive stone implements have likewise been lately found in Brittany.

in the same epoch the arts of spinning and weaving were discovered.

THE PATRIARCHAL

AGE.

When men began to gather together into larger groups these were at first still formed upon the model of the family. The earliest system of organised civil society was the patriarchal.1 Upon this point Sir Henry Maine speaks in unequivocal terms.2 "The effect of the evidence derived from comparative jurisprudence," he says, "is to establish that view of the primeval condition of the human race which is known as the Patriarchal Theory." This theory "was originally based on the Scripture history of the Hebrew patriarchs in Lower Asia:" and that connection, he thinks, "has rather militated against its reception as a complete theory." Quite independent investigations have, however, conducted him "inevitably to the same conclusion," till, "the difficulty at the present stage of the inquiry is to know where to stop, to say of what race it is not allowable to lay down that the society in which they are united was originally organised on the patriarchal model.” The "chief lineaments" of such a society are therefore, as the same writer observes, familiar to most of us from childhood. "The points which lie on the surface are these: The eldest male parent-the eldest descendant-is absolutely supreme in his household. His dominion extends to life and death, and is as unqualified over his children and their houses as over his slaves; indeed the relations of sonship

1 This is disputed. Many recent writers of eminence (the brothers M'Lennan, Bachofen, and Morgan, for instance) believe that a communal state of all relations generally preceded the institution of the family. The questions of precedence is not pertinent here, nor is it properly within our province to discuss what constitutes organised civil society. It is sufficient for the purpose in view to sketch the main outlines of the communal and patriarchal systems in their industrial connections. See on this subject Sir J. Lubbock's Origin of Civilisation, fourth edition, pp. 98, 99.

2 Ancient Law, eighth edition, p. 122 et seq. (Murray, 1880).