recognition of rightful claims. Alike in respect of life, liberty, and property, the change is traceable.

In every quarter of the globe and among all varieties of men, infanticide exists, or has existed, as a customary or legalized usage-carried sometimes to the extent of onehalf of those born. Especially where, the means of subsistence being small, much increase of the tribe is disastrous, the sacrifices of the newly-born are frequent: the females being those oftenest killed because they do not promise to be of value in war. The practices of the Greeks, as well as those of the early Romans, among whom a father might kill his child at will, show that regard for the rights of the immature was no greater in law, though it may have been greater in usage. Of the early Teutons and Celts the like may be said: their habit of exposing infants, and in that way indirectly killing them, continued long after denunciation of it by the Christian church. Of course with disregard for the lives of the young has everywhere gone disregard for their liberties. The practice of selling them, either for adoption or as slaves, has prevailed widely. Not only among the Fuegians, the people of New Guinea, the New Zealanders, the Dyaks, the Malagasy, and many other uncivilized peoples, is there barter of children, but children were similarly dealt with by the forefathers of the civilized. Hebrew custom allowed sale of them, and seizure for debt. The Romans continued to sell them down to the time of the emperors, and after the establishment of Christianity. By the Celts of Gaul the like traffic was carried on until edicts of the Roman emperors suppressed it; and the Germans persisted in it till the reign of Charlemagne. Of course, if the liberties of the young were disregarded in this extreme way, they were disregarded in minor ways. No matter what age a Roman had attained, he could not marry without his father's consent. Of course, too, along with non-recognition of the rights of life and liberty went

non-recognition of the right of property. If a child could not possess himself, he clearly could not possess anything else. Hence the fact that by legal devices only did the son among the Romans acquire independent ownership of certain kinds of property, such as spoil taken in war and certain salaries for civil services.

Through what stages there has been eventually reached that large admission of children's rightful claims now seen in civilized societies, cannot here be described. Successive changes have gradually established for the young large liberties liberties which are, indeed, in some cases, as in the United States, greater than is either just or politic. That which it concerns us here chiefly to note is that recognition of the rights of children has progressed fastest and farthest where the industrial type has most outgrown the militant type. In France, down to the time of the revolution, children continued to be treated as slaves. Sons who, even when adults, offended their fathers, could be, and sometimes were, put in prison by them; and girls were thrust into convents against their wills. Only after the revolution were the rights of sons "at last proclaimed," and "individual liberty was no longer at the mercy of lettres de cachet obtained by unjust or cruel fathers." But though among ourselves in past centuries the treatment of children was harsh, a father had not the power of imprisoning his son simply on his own motion. Though, up to recent generations, parental interdicts on the marriages of children, even when of age, were to a large extent voluntarily recognized, they were not legally enforced. And while at the present time, on the continent, parental restraints on marriage to a great extent prevail, in England marriage contrary to parental wishes, quite practicable, does not even excite much reprobation: oftentimes, indeed, no reprobation.

Thus an extreme contrast exists between those early states in which a child, like a brute, could be killed with

impunity, and modern states in which infanticide is classed as murder and artificial abortion as a crime, in which harsh treatment or inadequate sustentation by a parent is punishable, and in which, under trust, a child is capable of valid ownership.

§ 96. Yet once more, then, we meet with congruity between theory and practice-between ethical injunctions and political ameliorations between deductions from fundamental principles and inductions from experience.

When we keep simultaneously in view the ethics of the family and the ethics of the State, and the necessity for a changing compromise between the two during the progress of children from infancy to maturity-when we pay regard at the same time to the welfare of the individual and the preservation of the race, we are led to approximately definite conclusions respecting the rightful claims of children. These conclusions, reached a priori, we find verified a posteriori by the facts of history; which show us that along with progress from lower to higher types of society there has gone increasing conformity of laws and usages to moral requirements.

to steam.

CHAPTER XXII.

POLITICAL RIGHTS-SO-CALLED.

§ 97. Every day yields illustrations of the way in which men think only of the proximate and ignore, the remote. The power of a locomotive is currently ascribed There is no adequate consciousness of the fact that the steam is simply an intermediator and not an initiator that the initiator is the heat of the fire. It is not perceived that the steam-engine is in truth a heatengine, differing from other heat-engines (such as those in which gas is employed) only in the instrumentality employed to transform molecular motion into molar motion.

This limitation of consciousness to direct relations and ignoring of indirect relations, habitually vitiates thinking about social affairs. The primary effect produced by one who builds a house, or makes a road, or drains a field, is that he sets men to work; and the work, more prominent in thought than the sustenance obtained by it, comes to be regarded as itself a benefit. The imagined good is not increase in the stock of commodities or appliances which subserve human wants, but the expenditure of the labour which produces them. Hence various fallacies-hence the comment on destruction by fire that it is good for trade; hence the delusion that machinery is injurious to the people. If instead of the proximate thing, labour, there were contemplated the ultimate thing, produce, such errors would be avoided. Similarly is it with currency fallacies. fallacies. Coins, which may be exchanged

for all kinds of desired things, come themselves to be connected in men's minds with the idea of value, rather than the things they will purchase; which, as satisfying desires, are the truly valuable things. And then promisesto-pay, serving in place of coins, intrinsically valueless though they are, are, by daily experience of their purchasing power, so associated with the idea of value that abundance of them becomes identified in thought with wealth; and there results the belief that it only needs a profusion of bank-notes to insure national prosperity: errors which would be avoided were the reasoning carried on in terms of commodities, instead of being carried on in terms of these symbols. This usurpation of consciousness by the proximate and expulsion from it of the remote-this forgetting of the ends and erecting the means into ends, is again shown us in education. The time was when knowledge anciently acquired having ceased to be current, the learning of Latin and Greek, in which that knowledge was recorded, became indispensable as a means to acquirement of it; and it was then regarded as a means. But now, long after this ancient knowledge has been rendered accessible in our language, and now, when a vastly larger mass of knowledge has been accumulated, this learning of Latin and Greek is persisted in; and, moreover, has come to be practically regarded as the end, to the exclusion of the end as originally conceived. Young men who are tolerably familiar with these ancient languages, are supposed to be educated; though they may have acquired but little of what knowledge there is embodied in them and next to nothing of the immensely greater amount of knowledge and immensely more valuable knowledge which centuries of research have established.

§ 98. With what view is here made this general remark, thus variously illustrated? With the view of preparing the way for a further illustration which now