GOVERNMENT AND LAWS.
Development of Government.—Froin the earliest period in which men lived together in communities they must have had some recognition of each other's rights, some sort of an expressed or tacitly understood "social contract." 'What this was at the outset has attracted the attention of anti quaries and students of jurisprudence; and the inquiry is not an idle one, for from this primitive compact, which it is assumed did not differ very widely among mankind, all later forms of law and government must have slowly emerged.
These researches have as yet not led to a unity of opinion as to the status of primitive society, or else they force us to the conclusion that no such unity of form as has been assumed can be shown to have existed; and to claim that it did so exist, and advance only theoretical reasons for the belief, is contrary to the methods of exact science and sound historical investigation.
The Family and What Constitutes when by the aid of com parative linguistics we carry such researches in the Aryan family through its most ancient representatives, the old Indians and Persians, the Greeks, Italians, Germans, and Slays, we find that the first and simplest com munity revealed to us is "a family," which simply meant all living together in one dwelling (familia from the Oscanframa,"house"). They were women, children, captives, and dependants of one kind and another, and were all under the recognized rule of the " house-master." Marriage was a distinctly recognized formality, and our word "wedding," which is almost the same form as then in use, preserves in its radical letters the intimation that the bridegroom went forth—" wended" his steps else where—to seek his bride in some other household, and brought her home (Schrader).
Lubbock's Theory.—We have no means whatever of tracing the social organization of the Aryan stem beyond this condition. But this would not at all satisfy the theories of Sir John Lubbock, Mr. J. F. McLennan, and others of their school. As has been mentioned on a previous page (7o), they claim that in the order of social development the tribe came first, a rude concourse, where the sexes lived in promiscuity; the gees or clan next, tracing its kinship through the female side, on account of the still prevailing uncertainty of paternity; and only after these did the fam ily proper arise, tracing its descent through the male line, the purity of woman having become reasonably assured.
forga n' s 7heoly. —An American ethnologist of eminence, the late Mr. Lewis H. Morgan, has developed this theory with much particularity.
He undertook to demonstrate that the family had progressed in ancient society through five successive forms, corresponding to as many stages of development of government and laws. These were as follows: i. The Consanguine Family, founded upon the intermarriage of bro thers and sisters in a group.
2. The Punaluan Family, where several sisters marry each other's husbands, and all form one household.
3. The Syndyasmian or Pairing Family, where there are temporary marriages between single pairs, but no fidelity is observed.
4. The Patriarchal Family, where one man takes several wives, and claims their exclusive allegiance.
5. The Family, where single pairs unite, and each party claims the exclusive allegiance of the other.
These forms, Mr. Morgan claimed, " sprang successively one from the other, and collectively represent the growth of the idea of the family." Against all such theorizing it may be urged that neither in history nor in geography has any tribe been discovered living in sexual promiscuity, and that it is contrary to the analogy of nature (see above, pp. 7o, 71); that the second and third of Mr. Morgan's forms of family life are only exemplified in local customs, which are rather those of authorized licen tiousness than of progress; and that the uncertainty of paternity need not be assumed as the origin of the tracing of descent through the mother, as that custom prevails in some tribes whose women are conspicuously vir tuous. Moreover, these views have not been accepted by those most friendly to such theories. For instance, Mr. McLennan, whose own theory has been referred to, mentions Mr. Morgan's work as " that wild dream— not to say nightmare—of early institutions !" Growth of States.—Leaving mere hypotheses aside—which, however, it seemed necessary to mention on account of the attention they have received—the farthest pre-historic period of the Aryan race to which we can attain by linguistic analysis shows us, as above stated, the " family " as a group of related or unrelated persons under the control of a master. Several of these families living together for the sake of protection, the heads of each claiming relationship to the heads of the others either through blood or usage, form the " clan," styled in Latin the gees, this word meaning "of common birth;" in Greek, the GI, par pia) or brotherhood, and in the old Vedic poems the sabha, from which last has lineally descended the Lombard and Saxon-English " thorp," a hamlet or small town.