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fruit, and eating of it live forever. Indeed, far from being prohibited to eat of the tree of life, man was implicitly permitted, if not encouraged, to partake of it by his Creator, who had told him expressly that he might eat freely of every tree in the garden, with the single exception of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Thus by planting the tree of life in the garden and not prohibiting its use, God apparently intended to give man the option, or at least the chance, of immortality, but man missed his chance by electing to eat of the other tree, which God had warned him not to touch under pain of immediate death. This suggests that the forbidden tree was really a tree of death, not of knowledge, and that the mere taste of its deadly fruit, quite apart from any question of obedience or disobedience to a divine command, sufficed to entail death on the eater.

Hence Sir James suggests that in the original form of the story the serpent was sent as a messenger by the Deity in order to instruct man as to the true nature of the two trees, and that he (i.e., the serpent) deliberately perverted the message, so that he might appropriate to himself the fruit which conferred immortality. In favor of this hypothesis several striking parallels are cited from various sources.

To the legend of the Flood a very long and interesting chapter is devoted (pages 104-361). Sir James agrees with all recent investigators in supposing that the Biblical story is ultimately derived from the Babylonian Deluge myth. It may be mentioned that he includes in his survey the latest discovery that bears on the subjectnamely, the very ancient Sumerian text found by American excavators at Nippur. Unfortunately, this Sumerian account is so grievously mutilated that very little fresh information can be derived from it. How far the other Deluge stories which appear in various parts of the ancient and modern world were borrowed from Babylonia is a question about which there has been

great difference of opinion. Sir James comes to the conclusion that both the Greek story of Deucalion and the Indian story of Manu originated independently. If the Indian myth came from Babylonia, we might naturally assume that it passed into India. through Persia; yet, as Sir James points out, there is no evidence that the ancient Persians had any tradition of a Deluge. In addition to the proofs which he cites on this subject he might have mentioned the statement of AlBiruni, who says in his book on the Chronology of Ancient Nations (translated by E. Sachan, London, 1879, page 27): 'The Persians, and the great mass of the Magians, deny the Deluge altogether. . . . Some, however, of the Persians admit the fact of the Deluge, but they describe it in a different way.' Al-Biruni professed Mahometanism, but as he was a Persian by race and a man of immense learning, his testimony respecting the Magians (that is, the Zoroastrians) is peculiarly important; that in his time (the eleventh century after Christ) some Persians believed in a Deluge may, of course, be explained as due to Christian and Mahometan influences. It is likewise remarkable that, as Sir James observes, 'in Africa, including Egypt, native legends of a great flood are conspicuously absent; indeed, no single clear case of one has yet been reported' (page 333). Thus the assertion, sometimes found in apologetic literature, that all nations have retained memories of the Deluge is shown to be baseless.

About six hundred pages of the book deal with the Patriarchal period.

The history takes the form of a series of biographies, in which the fortunes of the nation are set forth, not in vague general outlines but in a series of brilliantly colored pictures recording the adventures of indi

vidual men, the forefathers of the race. The unity which runs through the lives of the patriarchs is not merely genealogical;

a community of occupation as well as of blood binds these ancestors of Israel together; all are nomadic shepherds and herdsmen, roaming from place to place with their flocks and herds in search of fresh pasture; they have not yet settled down to the humdrum life of the peasant, who repeats, year after year, the same monotonous round of labor on the same fields on which his father and his father's father had labored all their days before him. In short it is the pastoral age which the writers of Genesis have depicted with a clearness of outline and a vividness of coloring which time has not dimmed, and which, under all the changed conditions of modern life, still hold the reader spellbound by their ineffable charm. (Page 391.) To this general description Sir James adds a footnote, in which he says: 'I see no sufficient reason to question, with some modern writers, the historical reality of the great Hebrew patriarchs, though doubtless some of the incidents and details which tradition has recorded concerning them are unhistorical.' But it is evident. that the question whether the Hebrew patriarchs are historical persons cannot be profitably discussed until we have proved that the general picture of the 'pastoral age' given in Genesis is a faithful picture in other words, that it correctly represents the conditions of nomadic life in ancient and modern times. Sir James appears to assume that it does; hence he calls Abraham 'the type of the Semitic sheikh' (page 429). On this subject it is worth while to cite some remarks published thirty years ago by an eminent Orientalist whose acquaintance with the nomads, derived not only from books but also from close personal contact, entitles his opinion to the greatest respect:

A generation ago it was fashionable to call Abraham an Arab sheikh; M. Renan is content to say that he is the type of an Arab sheikh; but in point of fact it would be difficult to specify a single feature of resemblance between the patriarchal life,

as described in Genesis, and the life of the modern Bedouin, which is not either superficial or part of the general difference between Eastern and Western society. And, on the other hand, the points of difference between the life of the patriarchs and the ordinary life of a nomad group are many and fundamental. On this question an appeal may confidently be taken to everyone who either knows the modern Bedouin or has made any serious study of the 'Aghani' and other documents of Arabian life before Islam. But, indeed, it is enough to appeal to the Bible itself. The Hebrews knew the wild men of the desert, and the patriarchal history draws their type in the person of Ishmael. The author who drew this figure was certainly not of M. Renan's mind as to the identity of the patriarchal and the nomadic life. The picture of the patriarchal age is an ideal picture, but it is not idealized from the life of the Semitic nomads, whose hand was against every man and every man's hand against them. If we accept the picture presented in Genesis literally, it displays a miraculous life. And the miracles in the history of the patriarchs are not mere garnishing which can be stripped off and still leave the image of a real state of society. That Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob could roam at large through Palestine without fear and without war, though they were aliens from their own kin, and had not become the protected dependents of another kin, is a standing miracle, and on this miracle everything else in the history of Genesis depends. If the supernatural explanation is given up, the whole notion of a patriarchal age falls to the ground; we must then assume with the Dutch and German critics that the picture in Genesis is idealized, in a way quite unhistorical, from the conditions of Hebrew life in the

ninth and tenth centuries B.C., when the nomadic past of Israel already lay hid in the mists of antiquity, and we must hold that the actual condition of the Hebrews in the nomadic age was of the far ruder and wilder type to which all other evidence points. (Robertson Smith in a review of

Renan's Histoire d'Israël, reprinted in Lectures and Essays, edited by Black and Chrystal, London, 1912, pages 610-612.)

But those who hold, with Robertson Smith, that the patriarchal narratives in Genesis are essentially unhistorical may at the same time consistently

sing, with its implication of fraud and treachery practised by a designing mother and a crafty son on a doting husband and father, wears another and a far more respectable aspect if we suppose that the discreditable color it displays has been imported into it by the narrator, who failed to understand the true nature of the transaction which he described. That transaction, if I am right, was neither more nor less than a legal fiction that Jacob was born again as a goat for the purpose of ranking as the elder instead of the younger son of his mother. We have seen that among the Akikuyu of East Africa, a tribe possibly of Arabian, if not of Semitic, descent, a similar fiction of birth from a goat or a sheep appears to play an important part in the social and religious life of the people. It will be some confir

maintain that we find in them occasional references to beliefs and customs which, even if they do not go back to the 'pastoral age,' are nevertheless very ancient. Among such customs we may reckon what Sir James calls ultimogeniture- that is, the rule whereby the youngest son has the first claim to his father's property. This curious usage which has been known in many parts of the world, including mediæval England - is discussed by Sir James at considerable length. He explains its origin by the very plausible supposition that in primitive times the elder sons of a family successively quitted the paternal mation of our hypothesis if we can show abode in order to seek a living elsewhere, so that the youngest son was the natural support of his parents in their old age, and finally became their heir. A different explanation, which has had some vogue, is that ultimogeniture was the result of the so-called jus primæ noctis — that is, the right of concubinage claimed by an overlord with his dependent's wife on her wedding night; but this theory Sir James rejects as altogether fanciful.

That the stories of Isaac and of Jacob offer traces of the practice of ultimogeniture may be admitted as probable. But Sir James goes much farther than this when he conjectures that the account of the trick by which Jacob supplanted his elder brother Esau is a reminiscence of a legal ceremony whereby a younger son was substituted for his elder brother as rightful heir to the paternal inheritance (Vol. II, page 4). In other words, when primogeniture had displaced the older practice of ultimogeniture, a younger son could not become the heir until he had gone through the formality of pretending to be born again, either as a man or as a domestic animal.

The quaint story of the Diverted Bles

The Times

that the pretense of a new birth, either
from a woman or from an animal, has been
resorted to by other peoples in cases in
which, for one reason or another, it has
been deemed desirable that a man should,
as it were, strip himself of his old person-
ality and, assuming a new one make a
fresh start in life. (Pages 27, 28.)

It is, of course, quite natural that,
among primitive peoples, ‘a fresh start
in life' should be effected by such a
ceremony. But in the present case it
is not easy to see why the fiction of a
new birth should be employed. If
the object was to make the younger
son appear to be the elder, we should
expect the ceremony to take some form
which suggested an antedating, not a
post-dating of the man's birth. But
not one of the instances of a fictitious
'new birth' which Sir James brings
forward seems to have any connection
with the question of primogeniture.

It would be easy to cite many other examples of the bold and ingenious suggestions contained in Sir James's work. But such theories, however attractive they may appear, are not the sole contribution which he has made to the exegesis of the Old Testament. His book is a mine of instructive facts for which all future students of the subject will be grateful.

ECONOMICS, TRADE, AND FINANCE

WHAT IS LABOR’?

BY A PAST-PRESIDENT OF THE INSTITUTION OF MINING AND METALLURGY

As there is at present an almost universal desire to make the world better after the war than it was before, and as the country is prepared, as never before, to make changes (and even experiments) for this purpose, it is apparent that to secure wisdom from the multitude of counselors, some education in general principles and some destruction of current fallacies are requisite. Words, and terms, and phrases are all-powerful to-day; and when the worship of these is backed up by a general and generous desire to do something, and to do it quickly, then serious danger exists of doing things which actually defeat the main object in view.

One term which has been terribly overworked during the war is 'Labor', and it represents several very different things to different minds, and it varies in varying circumstances. To many it represents those men and women who work with their hands; but as this is obviously too wide a definition for many purposes of political argument, it is sometimes narrowed to those who are paid by the hour or the day, as distinct from those who are paid by the week, or the month, or the year. To those who calculate in terms of votes, labor is really that minority of actual workers who are organized for the effective exercise of power in trades unions, and who are, in fact, an aristocracy of those who labor, having special skill, special rules of their own, special advantages by their organiza

tion, and having special legal privileges over the remainder of the population. From this looseness of definition many errors in judgment on practical measures result. For instance, persons with an active sympathy for the sufferers from bad conditions of living among laborers subject to irregular-employment and low wages are led to sympathize with any artificially engineered agitation among the regularly-employed and well-paid members of some trades union, regardless of the particular questions involved; this simply because it is labeled in the press 'Labor unrest,' and quite regardless of the fact that such agitation often results in increased suffering for the real objects of their sympathy, and for the mass of the working population not thought of as 'Labor.' During the war, while the welfare and even existence of the nation were at stake, while the great mass of the population of all classes were making the greatest sacrifices and exertions to insure victory, there have been constant strikes of workers whose labor was essential to the conduct of the war. These have been strikes against the Government and the nation, not against individual employers; and they have been carried out by those of the population who on the whole suffered less during the war than any other class. There has been at times an absolute misrepresentation of the facts by the press, in attempting to explain 'unrest' as connected with past misdeeds of private employers, as due to over-work, increased cost of living, or want of tact on the part of the Government. All such causes were equally operative in the living conditions of the vast majority of the people,

and could not be claimed as an excuse by a small, privileged, and well-paid class whose sacrifices were less than the average. When a small body of men did in many cases practically blackmail the country in its supreme difficulty of continuance of the war, and then took advantage of increased wages or piece-work to work less hours per week than before the war, it was a palpable absurdity to make such excuses for their conduct as those just referred to; and it was equally absurd to quote the large numbers of a class loosely called 'labor' who were fighting, as offering any reason for not sternly rebuking those who preferred not to fight, but refused to work strenuously with all other non-combatants. If we assume that the Government were forced to wink at many evils from fear of worse, and that the press conscientiously blacked itself for its part in support of the production of necessaries at any cost, it remains to-day a pressing duty to the country that plain speaking should now attempt to correct false impressions of the past, and to check the dangerous habits of loose reasoning on the policy for the future.

The inexcusable conduct of the members of some of the trades unions did not arise from disloyalty of the majority of the workingmen; and in most cases it did not arise with the consent of the regular and experienced officials of the unions. Its real origin is in a small number of agitators to whom the war itself, and the immediate welfare of the worker, were as nothing in importance compared with their own particular form of revolution in society in general. The activity of these reformers has been immensely helped by a very widely distributed press, the nature and very existence of which are unknown to the general public. When a strike is advocated, the mass of the members in the branch or the union

affected will blindly follow, even if opposed to action at first. The facts and dangers of the situation were very plainly set forth in several articles which began in the Times of September 28, 1917, and were entitled "The Ferment of Revolution.' These articles were written by a professor in one of the Universities who has a strong sympathy with all legitimate efforts at improving the conditions of life for all underpaid labor. Events since the articles appeared have fully justified the writer, but too little attention was paid to them when published. In the opinion of most business men experienced in the industries of the country, the Government made a great mistake in not putting the loyalty of the men and their unions to the test in the spring of 1917, when a number of the agitators had been arrested for breach of the Defense of the Realm Act, and were released on a threat of a general strike, and who have been brilliantly active since in engineering strike after strike, reducing production, and costing the country tens of millions of pounds.

To those who do not follow the movements of revolution beyond the formal appearances of it at labor conferences, as published in the daily papers, it will illuminate certain aspects to repeat here the substance of a speech made by a well-known agitator at a public meeting of people interested in the attempt to introduce councils of employers and employed in the operation of workshops. After favorable remarks and friendly criticism of details of application from employers, various reformers, and from leaders of trades unions present, the agitator spoke in effect as follows: 'You have heard the views of employers and some officials of unions. Now I will give you the views of the workingman at the bench. We are not going

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