When we come to trace the attitude of other races, of other civilizations, toward children, we find much the same story: out of barbarism, civilization; out of civilization, humanity, though it has been usually the great Semitic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Mohammedanism—that have awakened the humane instinct the world over. The humane teachings of the Stoics were not unlike those of the great religious teachers, but, lacking the intense driving power of religious fervour, it is doubtful if they could have accomplished the revolutions that these three religions did.
That all the great nations, the historical divisions of the races, or those that passed out of barbarism into civilization, carried with them some trace of early cannibalistic days or child-murder days, seems a safe conclusion; and while occasional followers and interpreters of the Malthusian philosophy have at times attempted to defend indirectly these practices as part of the checks and balances by which over-population is defeated, the fact remains that the development of the parental instinct, the greatest of civilizing forces, has slowly, but surely, tended to put an end to these “checking” and “balancing” practices.
CHAPTER II
HUMAN MARRIAGE—EVOLUTION OF THE PARENTAL INSTINCT—SOCIAL CONDITIONS AMONG PAPUANS—CHILD’S PLACE IN THE TRIBE.
IT is now believed by many scientists that the cradle of the human race was the Indo-Malaysian intertropical lands.
The discovery of the remains of the Pithecanthropus erectus in 1892 by Dr. Eugene Dubois in the pliocene beds of East Java, established as a strong probability what was up to that time regarded as a mere speculation. Keane[14] and Sir John Evans[15] now assert that man originated in the East in this vicinity and migrated thence to Europe.
In this semi-glacial period, man, having taken on much of his human character and being now an erect animal (although in physical and mental respects he still resembled his nearest kin), had little difficulty in migrating.
During the immensely long old Stone Age to which Peroché assigns a period of some three hundred thousand years since the beginning of the Ghellian epoch, the pleistocene precursors underwent very few or slight specializations or developments, a fact due mainly to the moderate and unchanging character of the climate during this long period. Progress in the arts, however, there was, to such an extent that in some things the period has not been equalled. Of this character are the exquisitely wrought flints of the Silurian period, which cannot be reproduced now.