as much as possible, and he himself is
dismissed with condescending praise for the excellence of his former
works. The details of his discussion are diligently criticised, but his
really great discoveries are covered up obstinately. The original
edition of "Ancient Society" is out of print; there is no paying market
for a work of this kind in America; in England, it appears, the book was
systematically suppressed, and the only edition of this epochal work
still circulating in the market is--the German translation.

Whence this reserve? We can hardly refrain from calling it a conspiracy
to kill by silence, especially in view of the numerous meaningless and
polite quotations and of other manifestations of fellowship in which the
writings of our recognized archaeologists abound. Is it because Morgan
is an American, and because it is rather hard on the English
archaeologists to be dependent on two talented foreigners like Bachofen
and Morgan for the outlines determining the arrangement and grouping of
their material, in spite of all praiseworthy diligence in accumulating
material. They could have borne with the German, but an American? In
face of an American, every Englishman becomes patriotic. I have seen
amusing illustrations of this fact in the United States. Moreover, it
must be remembered that McLennan was, so to say, the official founder
and leader of the English prehistoric school. It was almost a
requirement of good prehistoric manners to refer in terms of highest
admiration to his artificial construction of history leading from
infanticide through polyandry and abduction to maternal law. The least
doubt in the strictly independent existence of exogamous and endogamous
tribes was considered a frivolous sacrilege. According to this view,
Morgan, in reducing all these sacred dogmas to thin air, committed an
act of wanton destruction. And worse still, his mere manner of reducing
them sufficed to show their instability, so that the admirers of
McLennan, who hitherto had been stumbling about helplessly between
exogamy and endogamy, were almost forced to slap their foreheads and
exclaim: "How silly of us, not to have found that out long ago!"

Just as if Morgan had not committed crimes enough against the official
archaeologists to justify them in discarding all fair methods and
assuming an attitude of cool neglect, he persisted in filling their cup
to overflowing. Not only does he criticise civilization, the society of