Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 18.djvu/131

Rh enforcement of these duties, governments change in all their substantial characteristics, and the great laws of evolution in the processes of differentiation and integration are followed, as tribes integrate into nations and the functions of government are differentiated; communal industries change to individual and corporate industries; communal property to individual and corporate property; communal marriage to individual marriage; communal government to organized national government, with the differentiation of the three great departments, the executive, the legislative, and the judicial; and these again elaborately differentiated with special organic members for special organic functions—all progressing with advancing intelligence to secure justice and thereby increase happiness.

This survey of governments in their totality presents one fact of profound interest to statesmen. Government by the people is the normal condition of mankind, as a broad review of human history abundantly maintains. Monarchies are temporary phases of government in the evolution of mankind from barbarism to civilization; and these monarchies with their attendant hierarchies, feudalisms, and slavery, appear only as pathologic conditions of the body politic—diseases which must be destroyed or they will destroy—and hence disappearing by virtue of the survival of the fittest. Hope for the future of society is the best-beloved daughter of Evolution.

Morgan has here been spoken of as a pioneer in a special field of research, but many others worked contemporaneously with him in the same field. Notable among these are Tylor and Maine, whose fields of investigation were, to some extent, identical with Morgan's; though in a larger sense, the areas which they covered were diverse. Where their studies were in common their methods of research were diverse. Maine and Tylor ransacked recorded history. Morgan plunged into the wilderness and studied Indian tribes, but his plan also included the study of annals; yet his work is largely made up of a record of facts previously unknown to science.

Long years of excessive labor, with sorrows that invade the domestic circle through disease and death, have somewhat decreased the vigor of physical life not long ago so characteristic of the man. On account of his infirmities he presided with some difficulty at the last meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science; but his mental vigor continues, and he is now engaged in the preparation of a volume on the "House Life and Architecture of the North American Indians," to be published by the Bureau of Ethnology of the Smithsonian Institution.

May his years continue and his works multiply! It is not one of the least of the results accomplished by Mr. Morgan that he has gathered about him loving disciples who are reaping harvests from fields planted by himself.