Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/243

 INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOLOGY 231

those of the steppes of Asia, except the Murras, who wandered from place to place without having any settled abode. All the other peoples gave themselves to the cultivation of the soil. The frontiers of the Murras, different from those of the other tribes, were movable, but it would be a mistake to suppose they did not exist. I would add that it would be another mistake to suppose that all frontiers are not movable; they are always variable. It remains, nevertheless, true that a frontier can exist, although it be fluctuating. In the example given above, differing in part from others, there is the continual displacement of population and territory which is characteristic; mobility of the frontier only manifests a quite rudimentary mode of adaptation and of social equilibration. When one tribe of the Murras established itself temporarily in a region, the territory of which it took possession was considered by all as the property of the community.

We see very clearly here that in primitive societies the fron- tiers called political are the frontiers or limits of property. But this property, in the case of which we are speaking, is commu- nistic, and if the society, because of the situation in which it finds itself, is warlike, the economic frontier, and also the other more specialized frontiers, tend to assume a military structure, at once aggressive, coercive, and prohibitive.

Can it be said, then, that the communistic form of property of the horde, the clan, or the tribe will come to be substituted for private property in land, or for other forms of property, to the advantage, economic and otherwise, of the group? Evidently not. The frontier continues, in these new conditions, to represent the organ of envelopment (enveloppe}, of protection, and of attack; the means of communication for the economic interests, and for other more specialized interests common to the group. In a word, with a content always variable, and under forms equally variable, the function of frontiers is constant, and con- tinues to be represented by constant, but morphologically diversi- fied, organs. The smallest special society has its limits correlative to its organization, just as individual societies have their limits in the great universal society, the forces and forms of which are equally delimited.