Page:Karl Kautsky - Ethics and The Materialist Conception of History - tr. J. B. Askew (1906).pdf/118

 of the various ages depends on the method of production. Does hunting preponderate, which renders the sources of food very precarious and from time to time necessitates great migrations, the old people become easily a burden to the society. They are often killed, sometimes even eaten. It is different when the people are settled; the breeding of animals and agriculture produce a more plentiful return. Now the old people can remain at home, and there is no lack of food for them. There is, however, at the same time a great sum of experiences and knowledge stored up, whose guardians, so long as writing was not discovered or become the common property of the people, are the old folk. They are the handers down of what might be called the beginning of science. Thus they are not now looked on as a painful burden, but honoured as the bearers of a higher wisdom. Writing and printing deprives the old people of the privilege to incorporate in their persons the sum of all experiences and traditions of the society. The continual revolutionising of all experience, which is the characteristic feature of the modern system of production, makes the old traditions even hostile to the new. The latter counts, without any further ado, as the better: the old as antiquated, and hence bad. The old only receives sympathy; it enjoys no longer any prestige. There is now no higher praise for an old man, than that he is still young and still capable of taking in new ideas.

As with the respect paid to the sexes, so does the respect paid to the various ages alter in society with the various methods of production.

The progressive division of labour carries them further; distinctions appear within each sex, but chiefly among the men. The woman is, in the first place, more and more tied to the household, whose range diminishes instead of growing, as more and more branches of production break away from it, becoming independent and a domain of the men. Technical progress, division of labour, the separation into trades were up till last century almost exclusively restricted to