[14] It is important to call attention to the loose use of the word “Society” in this quotation, as practically synonomous with the State. In their final definition, the two terms are antithetical. There is general agreement among scholars, according to Professor Beard, that in the genesis of the State, exploitation was primary, and organization for other purposes, e.g., what we know as “law and order,” was incidental and secondary. The term Society, then, really implies the disappearance of the State, and is commonly so used by scholars. Even now, too, tribes which have never formed a State and are without government of any kind, maintain society, i.e., a quite highly organized mode of communal life. Thomas Jefferson remarked this phenomenon among the American Indian hunting tribes, and so did the historian Parkman. [15] This motive is especially powerful in the United States, because monopoly in this country even now permits people to do relatively well. Moreover, there is still a strong current of optimism attributable to the failure of Americans to see that the old days of almost unlimited opportunity ended with the closing of the frontier. If the American family finds itself in straitened circumstances, its members are likely to attribute the fact to “hard times,” and to expect an improvement before long, since the country has recovered from a panic about every twenty years for the past century. They do not understand that the measure of recovery they hope for is now impossible. How many Americans, I wonder, have stopped to ask themselves why this country has suffered from _uninterrupted_ economic “depression,” with the exception of the war-period, ever since the panic of 1907? What they regard as depression is really the normal result of complete land-monopoly and high tariffs. Prices have continued to rise since the war; which is to say that real wages have fallen. [16] According to Herriot, children form the wealth of savage tribes. [17] The first passage I have quoted is from “Love and Marriage”; the other two I have taken from Miss Key’s “The Younger Generation,” simply because I found the ideas they contain somewhat more clearly and definitely expressed in that book than in the other. [18] Franz Oppenheimer, Theorie der Reinen und Politischen Œkonomie. Berlin, 1912. [19] For a striking and characteristic example of this ineptitude, I refer my readers to Dr. Havelock Ellis’s little book, “Eugenics Made Plain.” CHAPTER IV WOMAN AND MARRIAGE I