Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/82

 70 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

Pherson, 8 " a field or strip of land, on the border of a district is an object of dispute and gives rise to a contest between the parties and their respective tribes, and, if the tribes to which the parties belong are inclined to hostility, they go to war." This is what is done between villages, tribes, etc., of the same peoples over a strip of land on the border of these small districts. Conflicts over boundaries have been, and no doubt will always be, most frequent, considerable, and violent. Even in our European villages and towns we see the same strife between neighbors. They agitate the parties interested and the neighbors. The con- flicts between neighboring tribes of the same stock are naturally the most frequent and active, especially if they are of an eco- nomic character. Does this not prove the Italian proverb, " They hate each other like brothers " ? These conflicts are naturally accumulative as the territory increases. As is seen in Europe, are not boundary disputes, even the least important, which arise between countries, such as France, Germany, Italy, Austria, and Russia, continual causes of apprehension? Among the least settled hordes, characterized by promiscuity and motility, terri- tories are not even defined. These wandering hordes inter- mingle, come in contact and continual conflict; their boundaries are very unstable, wavering; but they exist nevertheless. The determination of a boundary that is, of an organ of protection, of attack and defense, and at the same time of relation always limits the structure and the internal activity, putting them in rela- tion with the external forces. This is the first and most general of all social differentiations; the essential conditions of the exist- ence of a community. Herbert Spencer has very well stated in noting the primitive differentiations between the external and internal structures compared by him, the first to the industrial or peaceful structure, the second, to military structure ; only, he has not seen that the two forms were, in their turn, decomposable by analysis, and that, in following this to the end, one discovers that whatever was the structure, military or industrial, the most general and simple form had been frontier. Herbert Spencer did not comprehend the constant and positive function of fringes

1 Reports upon the Khonds of Ganjani and Cuttach, Calcutta, 1842-43.