Chapter I

The Patriarchal Family

There is one class of men who from time to time have taken a keen and practical interest in the constitution of the Family, and they are the Statesmen. They have realised how intimately the welfare of the State depends upon the influence and nature of the Families from which it is constituted; and they have endeavoured that the State in turn should mould and influence the Family to its own purposes. Hence it comes about that the first and most obvious material which presented itself for the study of the Family was found in ancient law. Law of course did not make, any more than it can destroy, the Family; but in law we have the systematic exposition of those customs which the rulers of a people desire to perpetuate or enforce; and the code of laws of a people represents its recognised way of life as distinct from its caprices and aberrations. Great stress has been laid, especially in the earlier stages of inquiry, upon the information to be obtained about the organisation of the Family amongst the Greeks and Romans and Hindoos, from what remains to us of the laws of these peoples; and there is no doubt that we can construct from them a very vivid picture of what the Family was at certain stages of its development. But it would be a mistake to assume that these laws, however primitive themselves, necessarily record primitive institutions. Laws are the outcome of a considerably advanced state of social development, and represent a society and institutions which may be far removed from their original simplicity. All that can fairly be said is, that the Family as represented in ancient law is the first of which we have documentary evidence; and the first therefore which we can realise to ourselves with definiteness and certainty.

The particular form of the Family which early investigators, basing their inquiries upon ancient law, assumed to be original and primitive, is that known as the Patriarchal Family; and from it they derived, not only later developments of the Family itself, but also the organisation of the State, and the power of kings. It is a form which it is easy for us to understand, because in its essential idea it is one with our own. That essential idea is, the supremacy of the Father in the Family; and our modern institution differs mainly from the typical patriarchal Family in the greater or less degree in which that power is limited. The limitations are imposed partly by law and partly by custom; and differ very greatly between different peoples even of the present day. A man's power may be absolute over his own children, but limited to one generation, or even to the earlier years of that generation; or, again, it may extend to his children's children, and so to all descendants during his lifetime. Or, indeed, if we take into consideration the facts of ancestor-worship as still practised amongst some peoples, it is clear that to a large extent his power continues even after death over the generations of the living. We shall have occasion to consider these and other modifications in detail, further on; meanwhile we may note in passing some of the more important points in which the power of the father has gradually been limited in the development of the modern Family:

1. The freedom of the sons to start independent households during the lifetime of the father.
2. The freedom of the children to acquire independent property.
3. The freedom of the children to order their own lives on attaining majority.
4. The freedom of the children to marry as they choose.
5. The right of children under age to protection from the State against the father.

In one respect only has the power of the father been increased, and that is in his relation to the Family property, and his greater freedom of bequest. (See Chapter xi.)

(The typical Patriarchal Family, which Sir Henry Maine and other writers have taken to represent in its structure the primitive form, is the Roman Family in the days when the Patria Potestas, the power of the father, was at its strongest. It consisted of the Head of the Family or Pater, and all descendants in the male line (including adopted sons and their descendants), and slaves. Over these his power was absolute "the parent, when our information commences, has over his children the jus vitae necisque, the power of life and death, and à fortiori of uncontrolled corporal chastisement; he can modify their personal condition at pleasure; he can give a wife to his son; he can give his daughter in marriage; he can divorce his children of either sex; he can transfer them to another family by adoption, and he can sell them" (Maine, Ancient Law, p. 138). Even the eldest son who was to succeed to his authority had no rights apart from him so long as he lived; he was always in subjection, and might not even start a separate home. Though married and himself the father of children he still remained a minor, subject to the complete control of his father.

Though the Patriarchal Family is large in the sense of including all living generations, it is limited in the case before us by the fact that it included within its kinship only descendants through males. A woman when she married passed out of her original family into that of her husband and became subject to the power ruling therein; a fact represented to the present day by a woman's assuming her husband's name on marriage. But with us the change of name involves no change of kinship; and we distinguish carefully between blood relations and "connections by marriage"¹. In the Roman family a woman's children were not considered to be related to her brother's children. This particular system of relationship through males only, which is known as agnation, is not the essential feature of the Patriarchal Family, though found in connection with its most extreme form. It is parallel to the system of relationship through females only which we shall notice later on, and which again does not necessarily involve the rule of the mother, though it is sometimes found in connection with a matriarchate.

The essential characteristic of the Patriarchal Family is the permanent power of the Father over the adult male members of his Family; and the source of this power, the reason which enabled him to maintain it, has given rise to much interesting speculation and research. It is easy to attribute the authority of the father over wife and child to the superior strength of the man, so long as the children remain young and weak; but when we find the authority still attaching to a decrepit old man whose sons and grandsons are in the prime of life, and when his power over his wife continues to an advanced stage of civilisation after the sway of brute force has yielded to the supremacy of intellect and spirit, it is clear that some deeper foundation than that of physical strength is requisite.

Again it may be urged that as progenitor the Father is also possessor of his children, and that his power was derived from the rights of a proprietor over his property. No doubt children were regarded almost as property; but the same power extended over his wife and children by adoption, who could not be regarded as property for the same reason. Indeed, it has been pointed out that the Roman term Pater signified much more the lord or ruler than the father in our modern sense; and that it might even happen that a man without children would be Head of the Family or Paterfamilias, with unlimited authority over all members of it. In fact, the one essential feature of the Paterfamilias was that he should not be within the Potestas of another man.²

Another reason adduced for the authority of the Head of the Family is the superior wisdom and accumulated experience of the oldest member, who is thereby constituted the most capable of conducting its affairs and ruling its members. Probably this cause counted for much more in the days when wisdom and experience and even knowledge were literally matters of private property, which could only be passed on orally, as it were by private gift, from one generation to another. But as there gradually came to be a generalised stock of knowledge, made common property by means of organised teaching and books, upon which every one could draw who chose, the importance of the old people as the only source of wisdom would naturally tend to diminish. Le Play, writing in the first half of the nineteenth century, notes this as one reason why Russia was still peculiarly adapted to the patriarchal régime "in a society where school education contributes nothing to the precocious development of the young, where knowledge is acquired only from actual living and from social relations, the old men have in fact an enormous superiority over the young people. These are conscious of their inferiority, and when in Russia one makes some inquiry from a man of forty he never fails to answer that such information can only be properly given by an older man."³ He notes instances of communities which have offered active resistance to the education of the young, solely on the ground that it would weaken the authority of the old. (Even in England at the present day we are all familiar with the opponents of our systems of elementary education, who maintain that it is responsible for a growing disrespect amongst the children, and an increasing impatience of parental authority; and it can hardly be denied that there is some truth in the criticism.

But there is one kind of knowledge which never becomes public property, because there is not (except in very special cases) any public interest attaching to it. This is the knowledge of family history and tradition; and just in proportion as family tradition is held to be of importance, the Head of the Family retains the peculiar dignity which attaches to him as the main storehouse of tradition and personal recollection. Amongst people whose main or sole religion is ancestor-worship this dignity and authority are reinforced by the whole weight of religious sanction, and it is to the fact of ancestor-worship that scholars now attribute the absolute power possessed by the Pater in the typical Patriarchal Family.) He alone knew the traditional cult by which the departed ancestors were to be worshipped and appeased, and he alone could pass it on to his eldest son, and so ensure the continued prosperity of the Family. Thus any member of the Family who should cut himself loose from the authority of the Pater, not only debarred himself from the protection and favour of the ancestral gods during life, but condemned himself to misery in the world of spirits, where he would be excluded from the family cult. ⁴

There is such a deep significance in the fact that the worship of ancestors and of the domestic hearth preceded that of all other gods of the classical mythology, and that even after these had appeared upon the scene, the prayer to the hearth preceded that to any other divinity, that I will give here a brief account (taken from La Cité Antique) of the religion upon which the Patriarchal Family of the Aryans was founded.

The basis of this religion was the belief in immortality. The spirits of the dead lived again, a shadowy life beneath the earth, whence they exercised power for good or for evil upon the fortunes of those who continued to represent the Family upon the earth. And upon the living members of the Family, strictly speaking upon the Head of the Family, they depended not only for actual food and drink, but also for the cult which ensured their blessedness. They were gods indeed, but only so long as the worship due to gods was offered them; failing that, they left their burial place and became wandering spirits to torment the living.

This worship, so essential to living and to dead, could be offered only by the direct descendants of the dead, because they alone knew the necessary ritual. Every family had its own peculiar cult, to which no stranger was ever admitted, and which alone could appease and satisfy the gods of that family. The cult was handed from father to son, from generation to generation, and could not be lost without condemning the whole series of ancestors to eternal misery. Hence it became a matter of sacred duty to ensure the continuance of the family. Celibacy was "both an impiety and a misfortune"; involving a "kind of damnation," both for the offender and his ancestors. At Athens the law charged the first magistrate of the city with the duty of watching lest any family should be in danger of extinction; and it was the custom in Greece, when the citizens were called out to war, to assign the posts of danger to married men who already had sons to carry on the family. "Une famille qui s'éteint, c'est un culte qui meurt." For those who remained childless (that is without sons, since daughters were useless in this respect) the expedient remained of adoption, whereby a stranger was solemnly initiated into the religion of the Family. By this he was constituted in its most important sense the son of the Family, and the heir to its responsibilities. So closely indeed is the idea of the Family connected with that of the ancestral worship, that classical authors are found to maintain that relationship actually consists in sharing the same cult. It was for this reason that kinship was counted in the male line alone amongst the Romans; no person could partake in two cults, a woman when she married abandoned the cult of her own family and entered into that of her husband, hence she and her children ceased to be related to the family from which she sprang. Hence also, in all probability, the comparatively slight estimation in which, even to this day, the daughters of a family are apt to be held.

This sacredness of the hearth, and the necessity of preserving its purity, became also the source of morality. It demanded from all who approached it chastity, purity from blood-guiltiness, faithfulness in married life. Those who offended against its laws must expiate the offence before being readmitted to its service. In our expression "filial piety" we still preserve a record of the time when religion and the due observance of family morality were one thing, when piety consisted in the exercise of the domestic virtues. "All was divine within the family"; love of home was a virtue, because in the home alone man found his God, and he loved his house as to-day he loves his church.

The Hindoo prayer to the hearth is beautifully expressive of this aspect of the Family as the strength and preserver of righteous living: "Thou restorest to the right way the man who has gone astray in the wrong. If we have committed a fault, if we have walked far from thee, pardon us." It is an expression for all time of the influence of family life at its best and highest.

Thus it came about that the Head of the Patriarchal Family was much more than the mere father of its younger members. He was high priest of the family religion; upon his strict fulfilment of his function depended the welfare not only of the generations to come, but also of all the generations past, and it is probable that the latter was held to be by far the more important. To serve the Family, to preserve its traditions, to protect its purity, this was the whole duty of man, at once his religion and morality; and it was this which invested with absolute authority that member of the Family who for the time being represented it and was responsible for its welfare.

It is interesting to pause here and consider how much we have inherited from our Aryan ancestors of this intense feeling about the Family. No one, I think, will seriously question that we still possess a deep and instinctive feeling of its sanctity, which may be due to the pre-eminent position which it once occupied in the religion of our race, or which again may be simply accounted for by the fact that we are of the same nature as our ancestors. It is still the guardian of morality, and there are few who do not still consider it their first duty to guard the purity of domestic life, and who would not condemn a violation of the sanctity of the Family even more strongly than the violation of religious observances. So far it may be said that the religion of the hearth continues to hold the first place in man's spirit; but with this great difference, that the weight of feeling is now thrown forward into the future rather than back into the past. If asked as to the meaning of the Family at the present day, our first impulse would be to say that its chief raison d'être, the duties and responsibilities which hold it together, are no longer the cult of its ancestors, but the nurture of the young. The modern father ministers to the needs not of the vanishing but of the coming generation, he worships the rising and not the setting sun; and it is one of the strange paradoxes which the spiritual world is always offering to us that this change should have brought with it, for good or for evil, so great a diminution of his personal authority. Even celibacy, if not altogether condoned, would now be deplored less for the sake of the dead than for the sake of the unborn, either the coming generation who must lack the comrades they should have had, or the souls which are denied existence in mortal life.

But though ancestor-worship has ceased amongst us as a conscious cult, it would be folly to imagine that the Family has shaken off the sway of its departed members, or that its fortunes are not largely ruled by them. Family pride, which at its best does so much to strengthen the young, largely consists in the desire to do nothing unworthy of those who have preceded us; and unwillingness to depart from the ways of our ancestors, even when altered conditions would make such departure "reasonable," is responsible for perhaps the greater part of conservatism. But even more powerful in its sway over us than our reluctance to depart from the ways of our ancestors, is our frequent inability to do so. The family spirit which was in them, moulding not only their ways of thought and speech and action but even their expression and features, is also in us, moulding our lives at every turn, and claiming us as inexorably as in the days when our forefathers gathered round the family altar. It is a common form of speech to say of this or that tendency or habit or capacity, more especially perhaps if we feel deprecatory about it, that we "get it from" a parent or grandparent; and all the rest we are apt to regard as peculiarly our own. But if we could know as intimately as we know our more immediate parents the long line of ancestors through whom the family spirit has passed on its way to us, we should probably become fatalists in face of the apparently overwhelming evidence that there is nothing in us that has not come to us from, or at least through, the Family. Family portrait galleries are a striking confirmation of the persistence of characteristics which ultimately govern the fortunes of successive generations.

To realise the nature and influence of ancestorworship upon family life we need not have recourse only to bygone times. Our increased knowledge of the East enables us to study it as actually moulding the lives of people at the present day. In Japan and the Japanese, a Japanese professor writes (p. 281), "Worship of ancestors still obtains, and exercises a powerful influence over the laws and customs of the people. Buddhism, which is not based on this doctrine, but antagonistic to it, was compelled to yield to the deep-rooted belief of the people, and adapt itself to the national practice; while the introduction of Western civilisation has had no influence whatever in modifying the custom." By some writers stress has been laid on the dread felt for the spirits of the departed, and the desire to appease them, but this motive for the cult does not seem to be recognised in Japan. "We celebrate the anniversary of our ancestors, pay visits to their graves, offer flowers, food, drink, burn incense, and bow before their tombs, entirely from a feeling of love and a respect for their memory, and no question of 'dread' enters our mind in doing so. Moreover, in the records and traditions of our country there is nothing that suggests that ancestors were worshipped with a view of propitiating their souls.

"Ancestor-worship was the primeval religion of Japan from the earliest times of our history, which dates back more than 2500 years, and it is universally practised by the people at the present moment."

Marriage as an institution is recognised by the Japanese State as the means of perpetuating the worship of ancestors, whose posthumous happiness depends upon it. In the eyes of the old law it was essential that a family should perpetuate itself for ever; and it was accounted the greatest misfortune as well as the greatest crime to die without male issue. But amongst the Samurai it was formerly only the eldest sons who could legally marry; it was unnecessary for the younger sons, who had no apparent hope of ever becoming the head of a household, and who were therefore known as "heyazumi" or "dwellers in apartments."

Though Western civilisation has been without effect upon the religion of ancestor - worship in Japan, it appears to be considerably modifying the autocracy of the Head of the House "until recently a house was a corporation and a legal unit of the State. But ever since the Restoration of 1868 the family system has gradually fallen, until at present the house has entirely lost its corporate character. Formerly it was the head of the family only who could fill an official position, serve in the army, and hold property. But with the reform in the system of government the members of a house were permitted to fill public positions, and with the reforms of the law of military conscription both head and members are liable to military duties; while with the progress of commerce and industry the younger members were entitled to hold public bonds, stocks and share, which the law now recognises as their separate property. Although the house has thus lost its corporate character in the eyes of the law, it still, nevertheless, retains its character as the unit of society. The new Civil Code, which came into operation in 1898, allows members to secede from a household, and to establish a new 'branch house' with the consent of the head of the family; for the law recognises the tendency of social progress towards individualism, but at the same time it makes careful provision for the continuity of the house. It is provided in Article 744 that 'the legal presumptive heir is not permitted to enter another house, or to establish a new one, except in cases where the necessity arises for the succession to maintain the main branch of the house. A legal presumptive heir is heres necessarius , as to him falls the duty of succeeding to the headship of his house, and of upholding the continuity of its worship. For that reason he or she cannot become a member of another house by marriage, adoption, or any other cause; nor found a house of his or her own except where the more important duty of preserving the continuity of the worship of the main branch of the house renders such a step necessary."

The practice of ancestor-worship in Japan, and its influence upon the organisation of the Family, is strikingly analogous to that of our Aryan ancestors as described to us by the scholars, even down to the expedient of adoption upon failure of male issue. But it seems likely that in time to come the development will take a different line. Amongst our own ancestors the patriarchal organisation of the Family, and the power of the Head, persisted after the religion which gave rise to it had given way to new beliefs. In Japan, as we see, the religion persists untouched, although the patriarchal organisation is falling away before the advance of modern ideas, and modern forms of industry. Both those who believe that the unity of the Family is based upon economic causes, and that with the economic independence of its members it is bound to fall to pieces; and those, on the other hand, who believe that its greatest strength is rooted in more spiritual causes, must watch the coming development of the Family in Japan with the keenest interest. Not only do changes proceed with wonderful rapidity when once initiated amongst that wonderful people, but the disintegrating forces of economic individualism will have to contend amongst them with the spiritual forces of ancestor-worship in its most complete form; not as the mere tradition and instinct which has survived amongst the Western peoples.

Notes