Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 2, 1891.djvu/427

 Rh different nowadays?) leisure is only possible with slave-labour. Again, slave-labour as an organised institution is only possible on a large scale when there is a strong and marked difference of race between slave-owner and slave. Hence it becomes à priori possible, and even likely, that when the elements of civilisation arose—a dignified architecture, a norm of manners and ceremonial—there must have existed a marked difference of race, with consequent slave-labour. All this tells for Mr. Stuart-Glennie.

But whether matriarchy arose as a result of this, with connubium between female slave-owners and their slaves, depends on evidence, and evidence is sadly wanting both in ancient and modern times in this direction. Indeed, so far as it goes, it tends otherwards: the status of the child follows that of the mother, it is true, in all archaic eyot systems; but how rarely, when status differs between the parents, is that of the mother the higher! Just at present, too, with Dr. Westermarck's book before us, need we hypothesise about matriarchy as a theory when matriarchy as a fact is on its trial?

Again, as to Mr. Glennie's views on the Swan-Maiden story, is it not somewhat embarrassing for him that the interest and sympathy of the audience are always invoked for the husband who loses his eerie wife? Quâ man, is he not regarded as the superior of the fickle, mysterious maid that leaves him for the break of a taboo? And what evidence, again, have we that the Swan-Maiden type of story has lasted on from the times of the White Archaian Race, whose earliest visible beginnings on the banks of the Nile are anterior to 14,700 years ago, whenabouts the Zodiac was invented?

I have thought it right to express my doubts about these more recent developments of Mr. Stuart-Glennie's views, as they might cause attention to be detracted from the more promising part of his hypothesis, the probabilities that civilisation had its origin in some dominant race, and was passed on from that race to others. Half the battle is