Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 11.djvu/466

450 leave behind one who should administer to welfare after death: motives which, strengthening as societies passed through their early stages, gradually gave a certain authority to the claims of male children, though not to those of females. And thus we again see how intimate is the connection between militancy of the men and degradation of the women.

Here we are introduced to the question, "What relation exists between the status of children and the form of social organization?" To this the reply is akin to one given in the last chapter; namely, that mitigation of the treatment of children accompanies transition from the militant type to the industrial type.

Those lowest social states in which offspring are now idolized, now killed, now sold, as the dominant feeling prompts, are everywhere the states in which hostilities with surrounding tribes are chronic. This absolute dependence of progeny on parental will is shown whether the militancy is that of archaic groups, or that of groups higher in structure. In the latter as in the former, there exists that life and death power over children which is the negation of all rights and claims. On comparing children's status in the rudest militant tribes with their status in militant tribes which are patriarchal and compounded of the patriarchal, all we can say is, that in these last the still-surviving theory becomes qualified in practice; and that qualification of it increases as industrialism grows.

The Feejeeans, intensely despotic in government, and ferocious in war, furnish an instance of extreme abjectness in the position of children. Infanticide, especially of females, reaches nearer two-thirds than one-half; they "destroy their infants from mere whim, expediency, anger, or indolence;" and, according to Erskine, "children have been offered by the people of their own tribe to propitiate a powerful chief," not for slaves but for food. A sanguinary warrior race of Mexico—the Chechemecas—yield another example of excessive parental power: sons "cannot marry without the consent of parents; if a young man violates this law. . . . the penalty is death." By this instance we are reminded of the domestic condition among the ancient Mexicans (largely composed of conquering cannibal Chechemecas), whose social organization was highly militant in type, and of whom Clavigero says, "Their children were bred to stand so much in awe of their parents, that even when grown up and married, they hardly durst speak before them." In ancient Central America family rule was similar; and in ancient Peru it was the law that "sons should obey and serve their fathers until they reached the age of twenty-five."

If we now turn to the few cases of uncivilized and semi-civilized societies that are wholly industrial, or predominantly industrial, we find children, as we found women, occupying much higher positions. Among the peaceful Bodo and Dhimáls, "infanticide is utterly