Babylonian, what she calls for convenience the Syro-Phœnician and Lybo-Phœnician, and the Chinese civilizations, avowedly with the purpose of outlining the history of ownership in these archaic communities; but industrial, militant and social conditions are treated with great fullness, and the position of women receives at every turn especial attention. Miss Simcox has shown throughout a fine enthusiasm for her difficult task, and feels that the two volumes scantly suffice for her purpose. "A sketch of English history and social growth," she says at the close of her second volume, "compressing the records of 800 years into half as many pages is apt to repel by the dullness that comes of brevity. A survey of five times as many centuries would need to be ten times as long to become less tedious; and the charitable reader is entreated to believe that the foregoing pages might have seemed shorter if they had been a great deal more numerous."
To the sociologist, who has the threefold task of finding his facts, reading his ideals out of the facts, and carrying the ideals over into action, this work is of great value, and especially so since its author is not merely a compiler of facts, but a searcher to whom the significance of the process underlying the facts is all-important. Miss Simcox thinks we have been superficial and contemptful in our views of the great civilizations of the East, and considers that the irritable West may learn a lesson from their permanence. She is obviously qualified to speak in this connection, and we give some space to the quotation of her words:
"Past nations lived their life as their fate and choice determined, with no view certainly to the instruction of posterity; and hence the truth of history must be distorted if we study it exclusively with a view to the lessons to be learnt from it for our own profit. It is only after reading the history of Egypt or China as disinterested students, that we can trust ourselves to generalize as to the conditions of the stability and conservatism, which we began by recognizing as the common feature of the great primitive civilizations. Knowing better than Cicero how great nations may not only decline in fortune, but actually cease to exist, we cannot doubt that there must have been 'wisdom and breeding' in any people whose life has endured for two, three, or four thousand years. We have seen that the same kind of qualities enable tribes as well as nations to flourish unchangingly for ages, so it is clear that this longevity does not depend upon political organization. The widest generalization that our facts seem to warrant is that it depends
