第76章

The process which I have described as that under which aVillage Community is formed, may be regarded as typical. Yet itis not to be supposed that every Village Community in India drewtogether in so simple a manner. Although, in the North of India,the archives, as I am informed, almost invariably show that theCommunity was founded by a single assemblage of blood-relations,they also supply information that men of alien extraction havealways, from time to time, been engrafted on it, and a merepurchaser of a share may generally, under certain conditions, beadmitted to the brotherhood. In the South of the Peninsula thereare often Communities which appear to have sprung not from onebut from two or more families; and there are some whosecomposition is known to be entirely artificial; indeed, theoccasional aggregation of men of different castes in the samesociety is fatal to the hypothesis of a common descent. Yet inall these brotherhoods either the tradition is preserved, or theassumption made, of an original common parentage. MountstuartElphinstone, who writes more particularly of the Southern VillageCommunities, observes of them (History of India, i. 126): "Thepopular notion is that the Village landholders are all descendedfrom one or more individuals who settled the village; and thatthe only exceptions are formed by persons who have derived theirrights by purchase or otherwise from members of the originalstock. The supposition is confirmed by the fact that, to thisday, there are only single families of landholders in smallvillages and not many in large ones; but each has branched outinto so many members that it is not uncommon for the wholeagricultural labour to be done by the landholders, without theaid either of tenants or of labourers. The rights of thelandholders are their collectively and, though they almost alwayshave a more or less perfect partition of them, they never have anentire separation. A landholder, for instance, can sell ormortgage his rights; but he must first have the consent of the1

up all his obligations. If a family becomes extinct, its sharereturns to the common stock."

Some considerations which have been offered in the fifthchapter of this volume will assist the reader, I trust, inappreciating the significance of Elphinstone's language. Noinstitution of the primitive world is likely to have beenpreserved to our day, unless it has acquired an elasticityforeign to its original nature through some vivifying legalfiction. The Village Community then is not necessarily anassemblage of blood-relations, but it is either such anassemblage or a body of co-proprietor formed on the model of anassociation of kinsmen. The type with which it should be comparedis evidently not the Roman Family, but the Roman Gens or House.

The Gens was also a group on the model of the family. it was thefamily extended by a variety of fictions of which the exactnature was lost in antiquity. In historical times, its leadingcharacteristics were the very two which Elphinstone remarks inthe Village Community. There was always the assumption of acommon origin, an assumption sometimes notoriously at variancewith fact; and, to repeat the historian's words, "if a familybecame extinct, its share returned to the common stock." In oldRoman law, unclaimed inheritances escheated to the Gentiles. Itis further suspected by all who have examined their history thatthe Communities, like the Gentes, have been very generallyadulterated by the admission of strangers, but the exact mode ofabsorption cannot now be ascertained. At present, they arerecruited, as Elphinstone tells us, by the admission ofpurchasers, with the consent of the brotherhood. The acquisitionof the adopted member is, however, of the nature of a universalsuccession; together with the share he has bought, he succeeds tothe liabilities which the vendor had incurred towards theaggregate group. He is an Emptor Familiae, and inherits the legalclothing of the person whose place he begins to fill. The consentof the whole brotherhood required for his admission may remind usof the consent which the Comitia Curiata, the Parliament of thatlarger brotherhood of self-styled kinsmen, the ancient Romancommonwealth, so strenuously insisted on as essential to thelegalisation of an Adoption or the confirmation of a Will.