Note RETURN — FOOTNOTES.

The fact that the family is the great social monad, as it is undoubtedly one of the oldest and most accredited facts in human tradition, so it presents to us perhaps the most important of all the lessons that history teaches—a lesson as necessary to be inculcated at the present hour as at the earliest stages of social advance; and Aristotle certainly was never more in the right than when he emphasised this truth strongly in traversing Plato’s fancy of making the state the universal family, to the utter absorption of all subordinated family monads. Here, as in one or two other matters, the great idealist would be wiser than God; and so his philosophy, so far as that point was concerned, became only a more sublime attitude of folly. The importance of the family, as the divinely instituted social monad, depends manifestly on the happy combination and harmonious blending of authority and love which grow out of its constitution—two elements with the full development and true balance of which the well-being and happiness of all societies is intimately bound up. The fine moral training which the family relation alone can inspire we find not only at our own door, in the fidelity and self-sacrificing devotion of our noble Highlanders, who derived their inspiration from the clan system, of which the family love and respect is the binding element,2 as contrasted with the slavish system of vassalage, the badge of feudalism; but in the habits and institutions of the three great ancient peoples to whom modern Europe owes its higher civilisation, Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans, specially the last,3 the great masters of the difficult art of government, who, to use Mommsen’s phrase, carried out the unity of the family through the virtue of paternal authority “with an inexorable consistency,” the beneficial effect of which could not fail to display itself in social life far beyond the sphere from which it originally emanated; for obedience to authority is the fundamental postulate of all possibie societies. With the family, if not absolutely, certainly with the best and normal state of it, most closely connected is monogamy; for, though instances of bigamy and polygamy, from Lamech downwards (Gen. iv. 19) to King David and Solomon in the Old Testament history, crop up here and there in the oldest times, and even in the post-Babylonian period, without any formal mark of disapprobation, yet it is quite certain that the Greeks and Romans were guided by a sound social instinct when they held the practice of bigamy to be inconsistent with the proper constitution of a family. What troubles are apt to arise from a multiplication of contending wives and ambitious mothers the latter story of King David tells in more unhappy episodes than one; and generally it may be laid down as one of the great lessons of history that polygamy, in every shape, is one of those acts of Oriental self-indulgence which may be sweet in the mouth but has a very strong tendency to be bitter in the belly, and therefore ought by all means to be avoided.