safest, and almost the only shelter for the child, and we cannot think of destroying this shelter before we have constructed a larger and better one.
Transformations so radical as these cannot evidently be wrought instantaneously, by a mere change of view, after the fashion of political revolutions. Nothing is more chimerical than to fear or to hope for the sudden destruction of our actual forms of marriage, of the family, and of property; but there is no doubt that all this is tottering. The alarm and the lamentations of so many moralists, both lay and religious, are not therefore without some foundation. Societies have always evolved, but the rapidity of this evolution is accelerating; it is, in some sort, proportionate to the square of the time elapsed. I fear that in the eyes of our descendants we shall appear slaves of routine, as our ancestors are in ours.
For those who have not firmly rallied to the side of the great law of progress, the future is full of terror. It has always been thus; the apostles of progress have always had to overcome the resistance of the sectaries of the past. From time immemorial, certain Dyak tribes were accustomed to fell trees by chopping at the trunk with a hatchet, perpendicularly to the fibres. One day some revolutionaries proposed making V-shaped cuttings, in the European method. The Dyak conservative party, inspired by the regard due to custom, were wroth at this, and punished the innovators by a fine.[1] Nevertheless, I do not doubt that the new method has triumphed in practice; it was found advantageous. But this incident is, in miniature, the history of all transformations, small or great.
It is very certain that in societies where marriage by groups half polyandric and half polygamic had been instituted for centuries, the bold agitators who attempted to substitute individual union were considered at first as dangerous revolutionaries, and those who dismembered into families the communal clan only succeeded at the cost of great difficulty and peril. Thus in the Oresteia of Æschylus, of which I have spoken in the last chapter, the chorus of the Eumenides gives voice to the protestations of public opinion against the establishment of the paternal family in Greece.
- ↑ Journal Ind. Archip., vol. ii. p. 54.
