^{page 175 note 1} Burke, Edmund, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1st ed. (London, 1790) pp. 143–4. Burke's easy assumption of ethical continuity between even distant generations may be compared with Hooker's statement that ‘the act of a public society five hundred years sithence standeth as theirs which are presently of the same society’. Both thinkers betray the unhistorical attitude characteristic of contractarian political thinking, and both are also assuming a metaphysical, revelationary principle of continuity over time no longer at the disposal of late twentieth-century social and political inquiry. See below.Google Scholar

^{page 184 note 1} For the generational depth of the pre-industrial domestic group, see Laslett, , ‘Size and Structure of the Household in England over Three Centuries’, Population Studies (07 1969)Google Scholar, and for an attempt to appreciate the implications of the change from this norm of familial relations over time, see Laslett, , The World we have lost, 2nd ed. (1970)Google Scholar. References are supplied in that volume to the historical demographic research supporting the conclusions cited above; see especially Wrigley, E. A., Population and History (1969).Google Scholar

^{page 185 note 1} Indeed it appears to have been doubtful whether a parent was legally obliged to support his children, which is a further incoherence of behaviour from the point of view of the present thesis. The attitude seems to have been, however, that no legal sanction was either necessary or likely to be effective in a situation where to offer nurture was a spontaneous and entirely ‘natural’ matter. The same curious reasoning is found in those lawyers of earlier times who justified the right of fathers to punish their children with death, on the grounds that men love their offspring so dearly that they could be relied upon never to exercise such a right unnecessarily or unjustly.