fixed for him. More than this, he not only marries into the specified totem, but he marries the whole of the women of that totem in his own generation..... Of course, it must not be supposed, that this condition of marital community really exists in practice. As a matter of fact, each Australian contents himself with one or two women from his marriage totem. But it is a fact that an Australian would see nothing wrong in a man living as the husband of any woman of his marriage totem, provided she were of his own generation. And if an Australian is traveling from tribe to tribe, he will, as a matter of course, find a wife waiting for him in every tribe which contains women of his marriage totem. . . . It will be obvious that, under these arrangements, there are no bachelors or spinsters among the Australian savages; but that . . . marriage is, among them, "a natural state into which both parties are born." ... It has been hinted before that some classification is necessary to distinguish the different degrees or generations within the totem group; and this is one of the objects of the mysterious corroborees, or ceremonial gatherings, which play so large a part in the life of the savage. . . . At these ceremonies, often lasting for several days, the youths and maidens who have attained to maturity are initiated into some of the mysteries of the totem, often to the accompaniment of painful rites, such as circumcision and other laceration. It is possible that, on such occasions, the initiated are subjected to tattooing, with a view of establishing their identity, and of allotting them to a certain totem, and to a certain generation within that totem. By this or some other artificial means, the curiously simple system of Australian relationship is constructed. All the women of his marriage totem in his generation are a man's wives; all their children are his children; all the members of his totem in the same generation are his brothers and sisters (whom he may not marry); all the members of his mother's totem are his parents (for descent is nearly always reckoned through females). Parent, child, brother and sister are thus the only relationships recognized. . . . Whether the totem serves any other purpose than that of prohibiting intermarriage of near relations, and what is the precise connection which the savages believe to exist between themselves and their totems, are much-disputed questions. With regard to the latter, it has been suggested by recent observers that the Australian believes himself to be, in some mysterious way, the offspring of his totem. There can also be little doubt that, in some cases at least, the totem is an object of worship, a fetich which will deal destruction if the rule of the intermarriage is not rigidly observed. And, if this be so, we get an interesting glimpse at the rudiments of two of the most powerful factors in human progress Religion and Law. It has been said that the progress of religious ideas follows three stages. In the first, man worships some object entirely external to himself, a stone or an animal. In the second, he worships a human being like himself, usually one of his own ancestors. In the third, he has risen to the idea of a God who is both divine and human, unlike and distinct from himself, and yet like to and connected with himself. The Australian totem would answer to the first of these three stages. But it is somewhat significant to notice that the savage's view of his deity is usually that of a malevolent Power, dealing disease and death, and thirsting for human blood. . . . Closely connected with this view is the savage's rudimentary notion of Law. With him it is a purely negative idea, a list of things which are prohibited, or taboo. The origin of these prohibitions is often ludicrous, but they are generally found to be connected with the apprehension of danger. A man is walking along a path, and is struck by a falling branch. Instead of attributing the blow to natural causes, he assumes it to be the result of the anger of the Tree-Spirit, offended by his action in using the path. In the future, that path is taboo, or forbidden. . . . The practice of burying alive a victim in the foundations of a house, as a sacrifice to the Earth-Spirit, whose domain is being invaded, is widely spread in savage countries. Whether the totem bond also serves the purpose of uniting its members together for offense and defense, is also a disputed question. There are traces of such a state of things, and its existence would certainly explain the development of a conspicuous feature of the second or patriarchal stage of society, the blood-feud group. But the relations of one group of savages to another are obscure and uncertain. Doubtless the members of a group, whether it be the "tribe" or hunting unit, or the totemistic marriage group, do not recognize any duties towards strangers. But their actual attitude is probably determined by the state of the food supply and the amount of elbow-room. If game is abundant, and hunting grounds large in proportion to the population, distinct groups of savages may exist side by side in a given area without conflict. But if game is scarce, and the land thickly peopled (in the savage state the two things would probably go together), wars and murder are, probably, frequent. Even the revolting practice of cannibalism probably originated in hunger; though there are some races which seem unable to abandon it, even in times of plenty, and plausible reasons are invented for its continuance. But it is one of the surest laws of progress that, with each forward step, the same area is able to maintain an ever-increasing number of people. And so the temptations for war, or at least the excuses for war, are happily ever diminishing. 45. Kinship and state origin. The "patriarchal theory" of state origin is set forth by Woodrow Wilson as follows: What is known of the central nations of history clearly reveals the fact that social organization, and consequently government (which is the visible form of social organization), originated in kinship. The original bond of union and the original sanction for magisterial authority were one and the same thing, namely, real or feigned blood relationship. In other words, families were the original units of social organization; and were at first, no doubt, in a large degree separate. . . . It was only by slow stages and under the influence of many changes of habit and environment that the family organization widened and families were drawn together into communities. A group of men who considered themselves in some sort kinsmen constituted the first State. . . . Government must have had substantially the same early history amongst all progressive races. It must have begun in clearly defined family discipline. Such discipline would scarcely be possible among races in which consanguinity was subject to profound confusion and in which family organization therefore had no clear basis of authority on which to rest. In every case, it would seem, the origination of what we should deem worthy of the name of government must have awaited the development of some such definite family as that in which the father was known, and known as ruler. Whether or not the patriarchal family was the first form of the family, it must have furnished the first adequate form of government. When society grew, it grew without any change of this idea. Kinship was still, actually or theoretically, its only amalgam. The commonwealth was for long conceived of as being only a larger kindred. When by natural increase a family multiplied its branches and widened into a gens, and there was no grandfather, great-grandfather, or other patriarch living to keep it together in actual domestic oneness, it would still not separate. The extinct authority of the actual ancestor could be replaced by the less comprehensive but little less revered authority of some selected elder of the "House," the oldest living ascendant, or the most capable. Here would be the materials for a complete body politic held together by the old fiber of actual kinship. Organization upon the basis of a fictitious kinship was hardly less naturally contrived in primitive society. There was the ready, and immemorial, fiction of adoption, which to the thought of that time seemed no fiction at all. The adopted man was no less real a member of the family than was he who was natural-born. . . . Whether naturally, therefore, or artificially, Houses widened into tribes, and tribes into commonwealths, without loss of that kinship in the absence of which, to the thinking of primitive men, there could be no communion, and therefore no community, at all. 46. The family and the state. The fundamental change that has taken place in the relation of the state to the family is well stated by Seeley as follows: 1 The primitive man may, no doubt, differ from the civilized man in a hundred different ways, but the primitive state—that is, the political organization of the primitive man when compared with that of the civilized — always, I think, differs from it in the same way, viz. that it is far more closely connected with the family. Take any highly civilized state, whether from ancient or from modern history, you scarcely perceive any relation or affinity between its organization and that of the families composing it. In modern England or France, in the Greece or Rome of Demosthenes and Cicero, the family has ceased to have any political importance. So much is this the case that those who, in the seventeenth century, speculated upon the origin of states often show themselves unaware even that in their origin and first beginning states were connected with families. The very tradition of the connection has been lost. It is supposed that a condition of lawless violence, in which the weak were at the mercy of the strong, originally prevailed, and that this was brought to an end by the invention of government, that is, by an agreement to surrender to a single strong man a part of the liberty which each man originally possessed, in return for protection. This theory seems to conceive the primitive community as a mere unorganized crowd of individuals. But the beginning of political organization is given by nature in the family relation. The authority of the paterfamilias may, or may not, be primeval and universal; but certainly in those cases where we are able to trace the history of states furthest back, the starting point seems not to be a condition of universal confusion, but a powerful and rigid family organization. The weak were not at the mercy of the strong, because each weak man was a member of the family, and the family protected him with an energy of which modern society can form no conception. In these cases, too, we are able to trace that the state was not suddenly introduced as a kind of heroic remedy for an intolerable confusion, but that the germ of organization given by nature was developed artificially; that the family grew into something more than a mere family; that it developed itself gradually so much, and acquired so much additional organization, as to disengage itself from the literal family, which now 1 By permission of The Macmillan Company. reappeared in an independent form within it; and that at last the conventional or fictitious family acquired a character of its own, until it first forgot and then at last denied and repudiated its connection with the natural family. Observe, I do not mean to assert that the state has in all cases grown up in this way; only that in the most conspicuous instances, where its growth can be traced most certainly, it has gone through these stages. 47. Religion and the city state. Fustel de Coulanges has, probably more than any other writer, emphasized the important part played by religion in the beginnings of political life. The members of the ancient family were united by something more powerful than birth, affection, or physical strength; this was the religion of the sacred fire, and of dead ancestors. This caused the family to form a single body, both in this life and in the next. The ancient family was a religious rather than a natural association; and we shall see presently that the wife was counted in the family only after the sacred ceremony of marriage had initiated her into the worship; that the son was no longer counted in it when he had renounced the worship, or had been emancipated; that, on the other hand, an adopted son was counted a real son, because, though he had not the ties of blood, he had something better - a community of worship; that the heir who refused to adopt the worship of this family had no right to the succession; and, finally, that relationship and the right of inheritance were governed not by birth, but by the rights of participation in the worship, such as religion had established them. Religion, it is true, did not create the family; but certainly it gave the family its rules; and hence it comes that the constitution of the ancient family was so different from what it would have been if it had owed its foundation to natural affection. . . . The tribe, like the family and the phratry, was established as an independent body, since it had a special worship from which the stranger was excluded. Once formed, no new family could be admitted to it. No more could two tribes be fused into one; their religion was opposed to this. But just as several phratries were united in a tribe, several tribes might associate together, on condition that the religion of each should be respected. The day on which this alliance took place the city existed. It is of little account to seek the cause which determined several neighboring tribes to unite. Sometimes it was voluntary; sometimes it was imposed by the superior force of a tribe, or by the powerful will of a man. What is certain is, that the bond of the new association was still |