daughter as evidence of mother-kin in the royal line, the crown descending through the female (1, 2, pp. 278–280). Such stories may rather be thought to reflect the migrations and conquests of tribes; to conciliate the conquered people the successful invader unites himself with the old dynasty by a marriage. Such is the story of Hengist; such is the record concerning Canute; such was the claim of William the Conqueror. We know that myths can be valuable evidence of ancient society; but they never ought to be interpreted in direct contradiction with a definite historic record. Our author regards certain Lydian myths about Omphale as indication of motherkin in the royal family and the inheritance of royalty through the female. This is in flat contradiction to the absolute statement in Herodotus that for twenty-two generations from Herakles down to Kandaules the kingship in Lydia descended in a direct line from father to son, all the Herakleidai being lineally descended from Herakles and a slave-girl (1, 7). Our author, therefore, 'conjectures' that Herodotus is wrong (Part 1, 2, p. 282); but such a conjecture impairs his own reputation as a judge of evidence.

The whole question of Mediterranean mother-kin still needs to be reconsidered by a thoroughly trained and unbiassed scholar. It becomes even a religious question; for many writers, even many scholars, still believe that it is connected with and explains the predominance of the goddess. Our author holds this opinion himself without much consideration of the adverse arguments that have been urged; he is only able to adduce one positive and clear example, namely, from Assam (IV, 2, p. 202). But suppose we accept his anthropological formula (one not wholly true), which is worded thus-'the divine society portrayed in myths reflects the society of the worshippers'; suppose it is the case, as he maintains and as the evidence proclaims, that in the societies based on mother-kin the power is still in the hands of the king or the chief or at least the men; we must then conclude that a society based on mother-kin will usually reflect itself on the heavens in the form of the predominance of the god. The prominence of the goddess then, as in prehistoric Crete, must be due to some other cause. And other causes have been suggested.

The sociological theory that is most prominent in the whole treatise is his view of the origin of the monarchy and of the social religious rite of the slaying of the divine king. With his usual initial reasonableness he admits that kingship may have had many origins. But his thesis that the king was often evolved' from the magician and in early days was a divine weather-charmer or vegetation-priest, whose periodic slaying was a necessary refresher of the earth, is very dear to his heart, and with all his industry and ingenuity he labours to discover traces of it all over the world. He has not convinced us that such was its origin in the higher societies of history, in Greece, Rome, Palestine or the Teutonic North. His arguments are too often frail and forced, his evidence, as that, for instance, drawn from the consecration of sacred women to the Anatolian Goddess, too often irrelevant. It is more serious that he should condemn and pervert the evidence where it is wholly against him, as he does with the Biblical testimony concerning the origin and character of the monarchy in Israel (IV, 1, pp. 18-25).

But those who steadily and critically read these volumes to the end will not close the page with a feeling of disapprobation. They may miss in Sir James Frazer the severity of trenchant logic, the self-restraint that rejects the irrelevant, the finesse of the critical sense. But these faults are the defects of his other qualities, which themselves are near to greatness. Even if the colossal work had no other value save as an unique collection of the raw material of primitive life, the value will endure and will shed lustre on the writer, who deserves the congratulation of friends and critics upon the accomplishment of such a task.

Art. 10.-STRIKES, FROM THE WORKMAN'S POINT OF

VIEW.

WHY do strikes occur, are they justifiable, and if so can no better means be found of attaining the same ends?

Were the question asked abruptly, Why do men go on strike?' the average employer would probably reply, Because they are discontented,' while the typical working-man might answer, 'To get fair play.' Each of these answers seems to bear a little hardly upon that section of the community to which the speaker does not belong. It is the point of view which counts. The following remarks, made from the working-man's point of view, are the result of observation and (may one say?) internal conversations among working men throughout a period of nearly ten years. An opportunity like the present is seldom given the working man, for two reasons; he is but half articulate, and his point of view is the wrong one-wrong because it does not appeal to the educated, who very naturally do not appreciate the mass of detail which renders the lot of the working man so much less happy than it might be.

This reasonable ignorance is unfortunate for the working classes in many ways, and is not to be dispelled by the ordinary methods of the journalist or philanthropist, for any attempt to acquire information' soon betrays itself and creates an unnatural atmosphere. In practice the working man or his wife being interviewed-however informally-will always paint working-class conditions very much better or very much worse than they really are. There appears to be no middle course in this connexion; and grave misapprehensions arise, damaging the cause of the wage-earners.

All working-class grievances (hence practically all the economic unrest through which we are passing) are due mainly to the fact that working men consider there is a want of logic in the attitude of society towards its hewers of wood and drawers of water. There is still a reluctance on the employer's part to realise that his 'hands' can reason and are quick to trace to its source any specific grievance which, in their opinion, would not exist were a clear statement of the facts made public This alleged want of logic produces two main results

from which all legitimate working-class grievances spring. First, the hours of the wage-earner are too long, and second, his pay is inadequate.

Consider the so-called eight-hour day. This would be more accurately described as the nine-hour day, because, for five days a week the working hours are usually eight and two-thirds in number. If the expression eight-hour day be insisted upon, then, as a matter of simple arithmetic, there would be no Saturday half-holiday in the forty-eight hour week; and the forty-eight hour week is the shortest within the general knowledge of the working classes. Terminological exactitude' is of something more than academic importance here, because working men may, with some show of reason, point to its absence as an indication of the spirit in which matters concerning them are discussed. It has been contended that,*

'In many fields of intellectual work men frequently take no account of time, but go on as long as may be necessary to complete some task, and much longer than any workman is ever called upon to exert himself. Some intellectual workers habitually do it-there are numerous classical examples-and even in ordinary professional life it is not uncommon. The head of a business often works longer than anyone in his employ.'

This is only incontrovertible if we assume that the bootmending, plot-cultivation and so forth, which actual necessity imposes on the worker, are not work. Employers seem unable to realise that the vast majority of their more poorly paid hands have to toil for very many hours, week in week out, to bring the works or official pay up to a living wage. Further, the working man does for himself and his family very many of those things which members of the more fortunate classes pay domestic servants or others to do.

Again, it is generally accepted as a fact beyond dispute that mental work is more fatiguing than mere bodily labour. Yet the working man in Government employ knows that he will be compulsorily retired at the age of sixty-five,t while he is also aware that Judges, Cabinet

* The Times,' Aug. 19, 1910: Mental and Manual Work.'

+ Ordnance Factory rule 70, 'In any circumstances workmen, whether entitled to superannuation or not, are compulsorily retired on attaining

Ministers, High Commissioners and others whose work is on the highest mental level may, and very frequently do, continue their labours to a much greater age. May not the labourer, worn out at sixty-five, contend that his toil must have been harder than that of the Judge still working at seventy-five, eighty or ninety? One who had earned his pay at both brain work and labour said not long ago, 'The truth is that, whereas mental work fatigues the brain only, manual labour fatigues the body and the brain too.'* It is matter of everyday experience that the man with a tired body can do no useful work, mental or manual-cannot even derive profit from reading -though the mentally tired man may do good bodily work and find therein recreation.

Up to this point our comparison of working hours has been confined almost exclusively to the notion of hours per diem, but it must not be forgotten that the working man will probably never have one entire week for his own until he is deemed past work, unless, in the wearisome years between schooldays and his premature old age, sickness or other misfortune befall him. Is he so much to be blamed if he sometimes compare his statutory holidays with the wider and more frequent breathingspaces allowed to others? and is it not clear that his hours of work, reckoned throughout the year, are very much longer than those of his superiors? Monotony and constant subordination too bring in their train an awful cramping of spirit quite unknown to the brain-worker.

Recent railway disasters have brought out in a painful manner the fact that monotony of work tends to subconscious performance, and we know that any action performed subconsciously is liable to be forgotten on occasion. Major Pringle, enquiring into the disaster which occurred at Waterloo Junction on Oct. 25, 1913, asked a witness whether men did not take things too much for granted sometimes.†

'When a man,' was the reply, 'is kept a long time in the box he gets so used to the work that it comes to him quite

the age of sixty-five.' The rule also states that a workman may be retired on the ground of age at sixty.