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to conceive it as exhibiting continuous improvement, like a tool or a utensil. The succession of political forms is regarded as a perfecting of government, of domestic types as a perfecting of the family, of industrial systems as a perfecting of economy. Hence attractive sequences, such as autocracy, aristocracy, democ- racy; promiscuity, polygamy, monogamy; slavery, serfdom, free labor ! Each form is "higher" than the preceding, and the series is never reversed. We can therefore arrive at a "law" for each ascending series.

But the actual series of forms is sometimes neither "evolu- tion " nor "progress." One will be disappointed if he looks either for a uniform evolution of the family from "the small, incoherent, and indefinite" to "the large, coherent, definite, and complex," or for a steady progress from the ethically "lower" to the ethically " higher." In its metamorphoses the family is not piloted by the ethical ideal, nor does it exhibit an evolution of its own. It follows closely economic changes. "To every type of economy," concludes Grosse, " there corresponds a par- ticular type of family." Thus polygyny thrives most where men control the source of the food supply ; monogamy where woman has a certain food-getting capacity. The family is strictly patri- archal with the pastoral nomads ; the matriarchate appears only when the woman disposes over economic resources of her own. Among hunters and pastoralists the clan will be paternal. In the Lower Agriculture it is often maternal. If now the family form is intimately sympathetic with the economy of a people, and if in the succession of these economies there is no fixed order some hunters skipping the pastoral stage to become tillers, some nomads skipping the tillage stage to become car- riers or traders how will it be possible to establish an invari- able sequence in domestic development ?

Vain, likewise, is it to frame a universal law for the succession of political forms. These forms are not so many stages in the perfecting of government but are adapted each to the prevailing economy, the makeup of the population, or the relation of the group to neighboring groups. Suppose the writer is justified in his thesis that political power becomes concentrated during a