of choice in all things where a choice is possible. Few men can die as did Socrates for an abstract belief in his duty to obey the laws. The great mass of men are imperfectly capable of choice. The highest are capable, the lowest are not at all. A poet has set forth this truth in beautifully simple words:
To every man there openeth,
A way, and ways and a way,
And the high soul climbs the high way
And the low soul gropes the low;
And in between on the misty flats,
The rest drift to and fro.
And to every man there openeth
A high way and a low,
And every man decideth
The way his soul shall go.
IT IS A COMMONPLACE among ethnologists that they can discern three primary races, the Negro, the Mongolian, and the Caucasic. This may be proven by cross sections of human hair, if in no other way. There was a Nilotic race, so called because in its original form it is still found along the Nile and because it came probably from that region. This undifferentiated race many ages ago furnished probably the basis for the Caucasic races. Its main developments correspond to the descendants of the three sons of Noah, the Hamites, the Semites, and the sons of Japhet. The ethnologist of Genesis was sound on the main fact of the single origin of the Caucasic races, even if the exploits of the temporary mariner Noah strain our credulity. There seems no reason to doubt that the original Nilotic race was approximately as dark as were the ancient Egyptians and Berbers. A great mass of this race passed to the north, and in the lapse of ages for apparent reasons became bleached into whiteness and in the farther north into blondness. One great spreading migration of this race peopled the shores of the Mediterranean. It is called the Mediterranean race. A part of the ancient inhabitants of Italy, Greece, France, Spain, and the British Isles belonged to this race. They found as their northern neighbors another Caucasic white race who are called the Alpines, and with them the northern portions of the Mediterranean race became mixed. The Alpines may have been tinged with Mongolian blood. Almost all of western Asia belonged to the Semitic portion of this Caucasic race.
Still farther to the north dwelt the part of the Caucasics that was afterwards to figure in ethnology as the Indo-European, or Aryan race, and this became probably the most mixed of all the races. The blond portion of this race has in late years been called the Nordics. Their descendants or supposed descendants have considered these Nordics a superior race, but this is a delusion of vanity and self-satisfaction. The mixed so-called Aryan race by migrations was to occupy Persia, northern India, as well as almost the whole of Europe. Some may differ from these classifications. Regardless of other considerations, the fact that this Caucasic race and the Aryan and Semitic portions of it are the only peoples of importance in the development of law among civilized men cannot be controverted. The migrations of the Aryan began apparently before those of the Semite, but the Semite earliest flowered, along with the Egyptian Hamite, into a very high civilization, while the Aryan was yet a wandering savage. The Aryan probably owed the civilization which he afterwards obtained to the Semite and to the Mediterranean race. In historical times we know that the so-called Nordics were civilized through their contacts with the Mediterranean race.
It may seem strange that omission is made of the Egyptians. The fact is that they, with all their talent, do not belong in the line of development. Nor can any sound idea of their law be obtained, until they passed under the Macedonian sway and borrowed much from the Greek law. But they had a very fine sense of justice and a powerful rhetorical appeal to justice, if we may trust the literature. A curious instance of a demand for legal redress against a grafting official remains to prove it. A peasant going from his oasis with his donkeys laden with produce is robbed by an official. He appeals for justice to a superior officer, who reports the matter to the king. The latter is so impressed by the peasant’s eloquence that he prolongs the case until the peasant has made nine different speeches upon the high standard of even-handed justice. The king was evidently entranced with the peasant’s eloquent eulogy. The translation given runs like this: “For thou art the father of the orphan, the husband of the widow, the brother of the forsaken maid, the apron of the motherless. Grant that I may set thy name in this land higher than all good laws, thou leader free from covetousness, great one free from pettiness, who bringest to naught the lie and causest right to be.” He reaches still higher in this strain: “Thou rudder of heaven, thou prop of earth, thou measuring tape! Rudder, fail not. Prop, fall not. Measuring tape, make no error.” He certainly deserved to win, as he did. His suit was granted, and the official punished.
Of the races in the true line of legal development we will notice the Aryans first, because the Semites at this same point of time represent a much higher culture. This Aryan race had the patriarchal household estate belonging to the family, the sacred fire and the worship of their ancestors in the male or agnatic line, and the forms of legal customs that go with such a development. At the same time, the aged and decrepit parents were thrust aside. Aryans had yet to learn a lesson in that respect from their Semitic relations. The power of the male head of the family over the family estate and over the conduct and the lives of those of the family was practically absolute. This was necessary in order to keep the family property together and in order to answer for the members of the family. It was a fairly reasonable rule for the condition of human life. The marriage custom was settled and the mass of people was monogamous. The chiefs and the rich, however, customarily had more than one wife. It has been said that monogamy was an evidence of the higher culture of the Aryans, and eulogies of their ancestors on this point have been offered by English and Germans; but the origin of monogamy was probably due wholly to economic factors. The prosaic consideration that Aryans were constantly sending off migratory bands makes it likely that they acted precisely as the beaver acts. When beavers migrate from their fixed home to establish a new one, it is always a pair that departs, and for the same reasons human beings were likely to enter upon their migrations in numbers of pairs. We may safely assume that the primitive man had as much social sense as the beaver. Instances like that of Abraham or the colonizing of the Greeks could be quoted to prove it.
These Aryans had developed, from their living in a constant state of movement, an unequal condition, due to the necessity for leaders and a crude sort of military discipline. The priestly function was well developed and they were ancestor worshipers. Among some of them the head of the family embodied this worship and was a priest as to its rites. They had also developed a system of serfdom or slavery. But it seems true that the Aryans were not cultivators of the soil.
The slaves and serfs represented generally captives in war or a conquered race. Whenever the rapacious Aryans came upon tribes cultivating the soil, serfdom took the form of a conquered race bound to the soil, rendering labor and services and grain or some kind of live stock to the master: but the slaves, at least, migrated with the tribe. Generally these serfs bound to the soil lived in a village community which represented, no doubt, the assembled dwellings of a kindred or large family of a subject tribe. This first form of slavery was not an oppressive system. The slaves belonged to the familia or household. The fact that the slaves or serfs were of the same race and color made ancient slavery a very different institution from the modern negro slavery. The institution was suited to the Aryan primitive cultivation. Social arrangements were simple. There was practically no division of labor, and of necessity the dependent classes were used as cultivators of the soil. The simple fact was that slave labor was unpaid labor. Payment for labor when no means of payment exist is legally unthinkable. Industrial organization of this kind can be traced in England from the Briton to the Anglo-Saxon and on to the English manor. Its development is no less clear in France.
