the patriarchal state: ethnology shows how he lived, grew, and
improved in that state. The conclusive arguments against the
imagined original civilisation are indeed plain to everyone. Nothing
is more intelligible than a moral deterioration of mankind--nothing
than an aesthetic degradation--nothing than a political degradation.
But you cannot imagine mankind giving up the plain utensils of
personal comfort, if they once knew them; still less can you imagine
them giving up good weapons--say bows and arrows--if they once knew
them. Yet if there were a primitive civilisation these things MUST
have been forgotten, for tribes can be found in every degree of
ignorance, and every grade of knowledge as to pottery, as to the
metals, as to the means of comfort, as to the instruments of war.
And what is more, these savages have not failed from stupidity; they
are, in various degrees of originality, inventive about these
matters. You cannot trace the roots of an old perfect system
variously maimed and variously dying; you cannot find it, as you
find the trace of the Latin language in the mediaeval dialects. On
the contrary, you find it beginning--as new scientific discoveries
and inventions now begin--here a little and there a little, the same
thing half-done in various half-ways, and so as no one who knew the
best way would ever have begun. An idea used to prevail that bows
and arrows were the 'primitive weapons'--the weapons of universal
savages; but modern science has made a table, [Footnote: See the
very careful table and admirable discussion in Sir John Lubbock's
Pre-Historic Times.] and some savages have them and some have not,
and some have substitutes of one sort and some have substitutes of
another--several of these substitutes being like the 'boomerang,' so
much more difficult to hit on or to use than the bow, as well as so
much less effectual. And not only may the miscellaneous races of the
world be justly described as being upon various edges of industrial