Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 11.djvu/534

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516
THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

ishness, are preserved only when and as far as the instinct of parenthood predominates. Clearly, then, weakness of the marital relation, indefinite incoherent forms of family, harsh treatment of women, and infanticide, are inevitable concomitants of militancy in its extreme form.

The advance from these lowest social groups, hardly to be called societies, to groups that are larger, or have more structure, or both, implies increased coöperation. This coöperation may be compulsory or voluntary, or it may be, and usually is, partly the one and partly the other. We have seen that great militancy implies predominance of compulsory coöperation, and that great industrialness implies predominance of voluntary coöperation. Here we have to observe that it is deductively manifest, as we have found it inductively true, that the accompanying domestic relations are in each case congruous with the necessitated social relations.

The individual nature which exercises that despotic control and submits to that extreme subjection implied by pronounced militancy in developing societies, no less than the fostering of egoism and repression of sympathy by a life devoted to war, inevitably determines the arrangements within the household as it does the arrangements without it. Hence the disregard of women's claims shown in stealing and buying them; hence the inequality of status between the sexes entailed by polygyny; hence the use of women as laboring slaves; hence the life and death power over wife and child; and hence that constitution of the family which subjects all its members to the eldest male.

Conversely, the type of individual nature developed by voluntary coöperation in societies that are predominantly industrial, whether they be peaceful, simple tribes, or nations that have in great measure outgrown militancy, is a relatively-altruistic nature. The daily habit of exchanging services, or giving products representing work done for money representing work done, is a habit of seeking such egoistic satisfaction as allows like egoistic satisfactions to those dealt with. There is an enforced respect for others' claims; there is an accompanying mental representation of their claims implying, in so far, fellow-feeling; and there is an absence of those repressions of fellow feeling involved by coercion. Necessarily, the type of character thus cultivated, while it modifies social actions and arrangements, modifies also domestic actions and arrangements. The discipline which brings greater recognition of the claims of fellow-men brings greater recognition of the claims of women and children. . The practice of consulting the wills of those with whom there is coöperation outside the household, brings with it the practice of consulting the wills of those with whom there is coöperation inside the household. The marital relation becomes changed from one of master and subject into one of approximately-equal partnership; while the bond becomes