Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/95

 MOOT POINTS IN SOCIOL OGY 83

from pasturage to agriculture in seventh-century Ireland, says: " Because of the abundance of the households, in their period, therefore it is that they [the sons of JEd Slane] introduced boundaries in Ireland." Jenks tells us that the earliest cultivators of the soil were " strangers attached to the tribe upon whom the rough work of the community fell, and who would be the first to suffer from scarcity of food." Elsewhere we are told : " When hemmed in by impassable barriers or invincible enemies, pastoral tribes under the pressure of increasing population slowly become agricultural." To the same force is due the change from exten- sive and shifting cultivation, where after a crop or two the culti- vator makes a fresh clearing, to intensive agriculture, where by an alternation of crops and fallow the same land is used in perpetuity.

Now, through these economic changes the movement of popu- lation becomes a primary cause of the changes in social organiza- tion to which they give rise. The adoption of pastoral pursuits converts the savage pack into the tribe, institutes property, estab- lishes male kinship, develops patriarchal authority, favors poly- gyny and wife-purchase, makes woman a chattel, causes captives to be enslaved instead of eaten, and substitutes the wergeld for the blood-feud. The adoption of agriculture changes the nature of the social bond. Says Maine : " From the moment a tribal community settles down finally upon a definite space of land, the land begins to be the basis of society in place of kinship." It breaks up the tribe into clans which become village communities. The back-breaking toil induces a resort to systematic slavery and the slave trade. Where settlement has already occurred, the pas- sage from simple collection to tillage causes a passage from the large patriarchal household to the simple family, and from family property in land to individual property with the right of bequest.

After agriculture is adopted, the increase of population does not cease to be a dynamic factor. The land is progressively occupied, until at last the laborer has no longer a direct access to natural resources, but must offer his services for wages. When this point is reached, slavery and serfdom begin to disappear, for coercion is no longer necessary to secure a supply of laborers.