第37章

It would be a very simple explanation of the origin ofsociety if we could base a general conclusion on the hintfurnished us by the Scriptural example already adverted to, andcould suppose that communities began to exist wherever a familyheld together instead of separating at the death of itspatriarchal chieftain. In most of the Greek states and in Romethere long remained the vestiges of an ascending series of groupsout of which the State was at first constituted. The Family,House, and Tribe of the Romans may be taken as the type of them,and they are so described to us that we can scarcely helpconceiving them as a system of concentric circles which havegradually expanded from the same point. The elementary group isthe Family, connected by common subjection to the highest maleascendant. The aggregation of Families forms the Gens or House.

The aggregation of Houses makes the Tribe. The aggregation ofTribes constitutes the Commonwealth. Are we at liberty to followthese indications, and to lay down that the commonwealth is acollection of persons united by common descent from theprogenitor of an original family? Of this we may at least becertain, that all ancient societies regarded themselves as havingproceeded from one original stock, and even laboured under anincapacity for comprehending any reason except this for theirholding together in political union. The history of politicalideas begins, in fact, with the assumption that kinship in bloodis the sole possible ground of community in political functions;nor is there any of those subversions of feeling, which we termemphatically revolutions, so startling and so complete as thechange which is accomplished when some other principle -- such asthat, for instance, of local contiguity -- establishes itself forthe first time as the basis of common political action. It may beaffirmed then of early commonwealths that their citizensconsidered all the groups in which they claimed membership to befounded on common lineage. What was obviously true of the Familywas believed to be true first of the House, next of the Tribe,lastly of the State. And yet we find that along with this belief,or, if we may use the word, this theory, each community preservedrecords or traditions which distinctly showed that thefundamental assumption was false. Whether we look to the Greekstates, or to Rome, or to the Teutonic aristocracies in Ditmarshwhich furnished Niebuhr with so many valuable illustrations, orto the Celtic clan associations, or to that strange socialorganisation of the Sclavonic Russians and Poles which has onlylately attracted notice, everywhere we discover traces ofpassages in their history when men of alien descent were admittedto, and amalgamated with, the original brotherhood. Adverting toRome singly, we perceive that the primary group, the Family, wasbeing constantly adulterated by the practice of adoption, whilestories seem to have been always current respecting the exoticextraction of one of the original Tribes and concerning a largeaddition to the houses made by one of the early kings. Thecomposition of the state, uniformly assumed to be natural, wasnevertheless known to be in great measure artificial. Thisconflict between belief or theory and notorious fact is at firstsight extremely perplexing; but what it really illustrates is theefficiency with which Legal Fictions do their work in the infancyof society. The earliest and most extensively employed of legalfictions was that which permitted family relations to be createdartificially, and there is none to which I conceive mankind to bemore deeply indebted. If it had never existed, I do not see howany one of the primitive groups, whatever were their nature,could have absorbed another, or on what terms any two of themcould have combined, except those of absolute superiority on oneside and absolute subjection on the other. No doubt, when withour modern ideas we contemplate the union of independentcommunities, we can suggest a hundred modes of carrying it out,the simplest of all being that the individuals comprised in thecoalescing groups shall vote or act together according to localpropinquity. but the idea that a number of persons shouldexercise political rights in common simply because they happenedto live within the same topographical limits was utterly strangeand monstrous to primitive antiquity. The expedient which inthose times commanded favour was that the incoming populationshould feign themselves to be descended from the same stock asthe people on whom they were engrafted; and it is precisely thegood faith of this fiction, and the closeness with which itseemed to imitate reality, that we cannot now hope to understand.