Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/241

 INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOLOGY 22$

were naturally the most warlike ; and still more was this true of the bands which set out en masse at random. We also see that always, or almost always, the military marches became the cen- ters for the formation of great military states, and indeed of the greater part of those which constitute the great powers of modern Europe.

Such are the general laws of development of societies whose type is, in whole or in part, the Mark-Genossenschaft, and the all mend or ordinary mark of the Germans. This presents the strongest analogies with the primitive forms of populations which have not been in relation with Germany; for example, those found among the American tribes. However, these latter have in general a less evolved economic structure. Thus, while the Ger- mans pastured their cattle in the mark, and had even established certain rules for the exploitation of the forests, and had dis- tinguished a sort of private property from the common ownership, the Indian tribes, still in the hunting stage, recognized only com- mon property, with the exception of certain movable objects. Already the German custom approached more nearly the Greek stage, where the free man was proprietor of his piece of ground, with a right of inheritance in favor of his family. But in Greece and among the American Indians, as well as among the Gauls and the Germans, the communistic forms reappeared regularly with greater or less distinctiveness in military colonization. The military, hunting, pastoral, or agricultural colony tended every- where and always to, reproduce the communistic type with its military accessories. The mark, whenever it has an economic form in military societies, is the most characteristic in the military marches, upon the extreme frontiers, while in the original centers this character tends to become more complex and to give birth to a peaceful development. In the interior the social development tends to become more and more differentiated from the military structure, whose force, on the other hand, increases in proportion as we approach the frontier.

The evolution, for example, of the possession of the soil, in spite of accessory variations, has followed almost everywhere an identical direction ; namely : ( I ) right of possession of the