IT is, or has been, a commonplace with 19 many that the system of to-day has been made by the growth of ages, and that our wills in the present are impotent to change it: but those who put this forward from their position of “standing on the ancient ways,” fail to see that this very fact condemns that position. The business of progressive minds is to recognise the coming change, to clear away obstacles to it, to accept it, and organise it in detail. Reactionists, however, although they deny it and profess to accept moderate, i.e. non-essential change, are trying consciously to stay that very evolution at the point which it has 20 reached to-day: they are attempting to turn the transient into the eternal: therefore by persistently reading the spirit of the present into the records of the past, they really annihilate history, which is not a mere series of actual events through which society, crystallised at once and for ever as to its essentials in the form that it assumes now, has cut its way, but is really one with the present society of which we are ourselves a part; is in fact society as regarded from its dynamic aspect, as the agent and patient of change. The 18th century view of history was entirely based on the abovementioned narrowness of conception,11 which forced men to look on "Homer" as a literary man, like, say Dryden and Pope, and on Lycurgus as an early Dr. Johnson.
The hopes for the social life of the future are involved in its struggles in the past; which indeed, since they have 21 built up the present system, and created us out of its conflict towards fresh change, have really forced us, whether we will it or not, into our present position of seeking still further change.
Modern civilised society has been developed by the antagonism between individual and social interests, between the holding of property in severalty and in common; and between the simple and limited kinship group, and the complex and extended political whole, or impersonal state, which has transformed primitive society into civilisation.
The difference between these opposing circumstances of society is, in fact, that between an organism and a mechanism. The earlier condition in which everything, art, science (so far as it went), law, industry, were personal, and aspects of a living body, is opposed to the civilised condition in which all these elements have become mechanical, uniting to build up mechanical life, and themselves the product of machines material and moral.
That all our industry and art is produced by a system of machinery is a fact too obvious to need enlarging on in this 22 place.12 But it may not be so clear to many that the system is dominant over other departments of human life; for instance, the blood-feud and the weregild were the foundation of early or "customary” criminal law: the penalty of the offender being rather negative than positive. In customary law the protection of society was withdrawn from the offender: in political law, society itself delegates certain men, who, without having any personal or social relations to the criminal or his victim, have to undertake his punishment, that is, to injure him by a mechanical procedure, so that the offender, instead of being a person excluded from the benefits of society, and merely ignored by it, has become an enemy with whose destruction, or existence in a mutilated condition society must charge itself.
The machine of criminal law is first set in motion by the police: the judge gives the law to the jury as a hard and fast mechanical rule, on that rule the verdict is given by the jury, the prisoner is sentenced by the judge by the same 23 method, and is handed over after sentence to the jailor, who in his turn has to torture him by prescribed mechanical process, knowing maybe nothing of his crime or his history, distinguishing him from his fellow-prisoners not by a name but by a number.
The same thing clearly applies to civil procedure, which is, if anything, of a still more routine character. It guards wealth, not as wealth, but as property only. Thus when it has to deal with the case of a lunatic, its interest lies in preserving his estate while the dealings with his person are put in another and subsidiary category. The difference between this machine law, and the arbitration, according to customary usage, of the chief, or primus inter pares, is sufficiently obvious.
It must now be admitted that no traces exist of any race of mankind living otherwise than in a society of some kind or other; the few examples, in which this was supposed to be the case, proving to be instances not of survival but of degradation. This primitive society at the lowest stage 24 discoverable had little knowledge of tools even when co-operation in matters of detail was considerably advanced. An instance may be given in the act of cultivation before the invention of the spade, where a gang of tillers thrust mere stout sticks into a ridge of earth, and by means of a combined heave turned the soil over. Indeed labour, as far as it went, was, under the conditions of the mere nomadic horde, co-operative. But the beginnings of a greater power over nature, mainly brought about by an advance in the co-operation of labour, produced a more complex form of society, which is the first society of which we have any definite knowledge. The land began to be accepted as the source of the wealth of the community, and as such, whether for pasture or tillage, was recognised as the definite property of the community as against other communities. The right of the individual holding (as opposed to ownership) of Property was based entirely on use, so that there was none that was not common, except the man’s personal gear, such as clothes, arms, and the like; this 25 is illustrated by the primitive customs which at first sight seems to contradict it, of the interment of the warrior's arms, etc., with him, for these were so buried because they were supposed to be necessary for his use in the continuous life which he was to lead in the land of shadows.
This primitive community took the form of a narrow and exclusive group based on the kinship, real or supposed, of its members. The three integral bodies in this society are the Gens, the Tribe, and the þeoð or People. The Gens is a group founded on actual blood relationship, in which intermarriage is forbidden; it cannot exist separately therefore, but must have another Gens for its complement: thus, since no “Eagle” man can have sexual intercourse with an “Eagle” woman, there is at hand a “Wolf”-gens for intermarriage.
These Gentes have a tendency to coalesce and form the Tribe, in which kinship is still supposed, but is not necessarily actual; as time goes on, the Gentes tend to lose their autonomous 26 existence in the Tribe; but the Tribe in its turn tends to merge itself into a higher unity, the þeoð or People, which is a federation of tribes, and in which the formal traditional kinship is in general merely mythical.
The opinion first put forward by Bachofen is now commonly held, that, at first, descent in the Gens was traced wholly through the mother, and that consequently the women were the recognised predominant element therein, the stock historical instance being that of the Lycians, as mentioned by Herodotus.
Among the Oriental Races at this period the patriarchal family had tended to supersede the Gens as the unit of social life. In Europe something the same in essence, but modified in form, grew up as the Roman Familia, of which we shall treat later on. It may be added that the existing conditions of life among the Bedouins in Arabia seem to show a curious blending of patriarchal society with that of the Gens and the Tribe. For the rest the primitive Patriarchal family, generally speaking, arose from the privilege of primacy of sexual intercourse held 27 by the elder brother of the Gens. This 1s indicated, amongst other things, by the custom known as the Levirate, “the raising up seed to the brother,” mentioned in Genesis and in the Gospels. The last survival of it was the jus primae noctis of medieval customary law, and its accompanying tenure of Borough English. It was along this line that patriarchal property-polygamy developed, and at last the modern monogamous family.
These groups above mentioned, whether People, Tribe, or Gens, were essentially exclusive; within their limits peace and community of property was the rule— without, a state of war was assumed; it was not war that had to be declared, but peace; the market, for instance, was originally held on the neutral zone between two social groups, where they could meet, to exchange commodities.013
The continuous wars which resulted from this condition of things necessarily produced slavery. This slavery was of two kinds more or less distinct from one another. A migratory tribe or people, In conquering a settled population, 28 after the fighting was over, allowed the vanquished to live on a portion of the conquered lands, on the conditions of rendering service to their lords; they were the serfs of their conquerors.
Frequent raids by the gentes or clans on each other produced another kind of slaves: the captives taken in battle ceased to be slain on the field, as soon as the captors found out that they could be used for labour which produced more than their bare subsistence: this was the origin of the Chattel Slave, who was the actual property of the conquering group, as the horses or oxen were.
The head of the kinship society, by virtue of his position as representative of the original ancestor, was the custodian of its wealth, and its leader in battle. But the frequency of wars often made other leaders necessary besides this hereditary chief, and these naturally began to have predominance over the undistinguished kinsmen. Meantime the power of production was ever on the increase: stone tools gave place first to bronze, and then to iron. The nomad 29 tribes began to settle when they discovered the art of producing grain from the original wild grasses, and supplemented their milk and flesh diet with meal and bread; wealth began to increase beyond the immediate needs of a limited population amidst limitless natural resources.
Since therefore there was an excess of wealth over bare necessity, its distribution began to be unequal, and the hereditary and elected leaders were allowed to consume more than the general average of that wealth, and class society began to appear, its first representatives being the chief and his immediate household.
By this time the older nomadic tribes had turned into settled communities living in villages, and surrounded by tillage, the whole enclosed by a stockade. In mountainous or hilly countries this was dominated by a fortress on an elevation, called the Bury or Burg. And in this burg and stockaded village we have the first element of the City.
The religion of Barbarism was ancestor-worship coupled with universal animism, ─that is to say, the conception of every thing in the world, animate and inanimate, 30 as a being endowed with human will and consciousness. The meeting point of these two elements of barbaric religion was the totem of the group, which was usually an animal or plant to which special religious honours were paid, and which was something more than a mere symbol of the ancestor, and was in fact looked upon almost as being the ancestor himself. It is the more difficult for us moderns to conceive of the state of mind that produced this notion, because we are so much further removed from nature than was primitive man; the development of the faculty of reflection has blunted the intuition of the senses, so that much that was assumed as real by early man has become preposterously inconceivable to us, though it seems as if there were examples of the survival in children of their near relation to nature, for some of them certainly accept their pets, toys, etc., as companions of a similar living race to themselves.
We would say here that some anthropologists, in drawing analogies between the condition of the present savage races and that of the ancestors of the progressive 31 races, seem to us to be too confident in accepting those conditions as being identical. May it not be possible that there is an essential difference between the savage peoples of to-day and the early historical races; a difference which forbids the former to develop beyond a condition of savagery, and that therefore these historical races have never passed through a state of society precisely identical with those of the modern savage?
11. It is curious to note how this view has acted on a man of such insight and such capacity for research as the late Lewis H. Morgan, who seeks the American democratic constitution in the beginnings of social evolution, alike in the Iroquois tribe, in the Greek πολις, and in the Roman city of the regal period.Back
12. It has, moreover, often been dwelt upon by the present writers.Back
13. Cf. Sir Henry Maine, Village Communities.Back