Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 133.djvu/68

62 , is enabled to ascertain the credit that is due to them "Reasoning on data thus obtained, Millar concluded that the earliest form of authority in human society, if not that of mothers in groups where marriage was not yet introduced, was that of the father in the family circle. As the family grew into the village, precedence and honor were allotted to old age and experience; and, still later, when rival villages become hostile, courage and strength marked the chief. Now that his authority was increased and established by the institution of property, his power was at once displayed and strengthened by the share he took in distributing tribal land. His good services, too, in dealing out justice were acknowledged, and next "the dispositions which gave rise to hero-worship led mankind to regard their princes, while still alive, as sprung from a heavenly original."

Without following Millar's account of later monarchy in Europe, it must be noticed that the divinity ascribed to chiefs, which he notices at so late a stage of the evolution of the idea of rank, was probably present much earlier. At the same time, though he allows too little influence to superstition in building up the fabric of society, he allots just importance to the factor of property. Property and divine rank seem to have been essential to each other in the making of social order; and where one is absent among contemporary savages, there we do not find the other. As an example, of this we might take the case of two people who, like the Homeric Ethiopians, are the outermost of men and dwell far apart at the ends of the world. The Eskimo and the Fuegians, at the extreme north and south of the American continent, agree in having no private property and no chiefs. The bleak plains of ice and rock are, like Attica, "the mother of men without master or lord." Among the "house-mates" of the smaller settlements there is no head-man, and in the larger gatherings Dr. Rink says that "still less than among the house-mates was any one belonging to such a place to be considered a chief." The songs and stories of the Eskimo contain the praises of men who have risen up and killed any usurper who tried to be a ruler over his "place-mates." No one could possibly establish any authority on the basis of property, because "superfluous property in implements, etc., rarely existed." If there are three boats in one household, one of the boats is "borrowed" by the community, and reverts to the general fund. If we look at the account of the Fuegians, described in Admiral Fitzroy's cruise, we find a similar absence of rank produced by similar causes. "The perfect equality among the individuals composing the tribes must for a long time retard their civilization. . . . At present even a piece of cloth is torn in shreds and distributed, and no one individual becomes richer than another. On the other hand, it is difficult to understand how a chief can arise till there is property of some sort by which he might manifest and still increase his authority." In the same book, however, we get a glimpse of one means by which authority can be exercised; "the doctor-wizard of each party has much influence over his companions." Among the Eskimo this element in the growth of authority also exists. A class of wizards called angakuts have power to cause fine weather, and by the gift of second sight and magical practices, can detect crimes, so that they necessarily become a kind of civil magistrates. The angakuts use a peculiar official language chiefly made up of allegorical expressions. Here, then, we have no chiefship, nor sacred rank, for the excellent reason that, though superstitious respect for certain people is felt, yet these people lack a material basis for their power in the shape of wealth. How important this basis is may be gathered from Sir Henry Maine's remark about ancient Irish nobility, — "Personal wealth was the principal condition of the chief's maintaining his position and authority." The same remark holds true of Homeric Greece and early societies in general."

It is now necessary to pass from examples of tribes who have superstitious respect for certain individuals, but who have no property and no chiefs, to peoples who exhibit the phenomenon of superstitious reverence attached to wealthy rulers or to judges. To take the example of Ireland, as described in the "Senchus Mor" we learn that the chiefs, just like the Angakuts of the Eskimo, had "power to make fair or foul weather" in the literal sense of the words. At the same time, there was no country in which the power to pass out of the common run of men and rise to chief's estate by mere increase of wealth, and after a due number of generations, was more fully recognized than in Ireland. "While the Brehon laws suggest that the possession of personal wealth is a condition of the maintenance of chieftainship, they show with much distinctness that, through the acquisition of such wealth, the road was always open to chieftainship.'