Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/776

 762 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

making movements and applying force, the male must inevitably assume control of the life-direction of the group, no matter what the genesis of the group. It is not a difficult conclusion that, if woman's leaping, lifting, running, climbing, and slugging capacity are inferior to man's, by however slight a margin, her fighting capacity is less in the same degree, for battle is only an application of force, and there has never been a moment in the history of society when the law of might, tempered by sexual affinity, did not prevail. We must, then, in fact, recognize a sharp distinction between the law of descent and the fact of authority. The male was everywhere present in primitive society, and everywhere made his force felt. We can see this illustrated most plainly in the animal group, where the male is the leader, by virtue of his strength. There is also a stage of human society which may be called the prematriarchal stage, from the fact that ideas of kinship are so feeble that no exten- sive social filiation is effected through this principle, in conse- quence of which the group has not reached the tribal stage of organization on the basis of kinship, but remains in the primi- tive biological relation of male, female, and offspring. The Botocudos, Fuegians, Eskimos, West Australians, Bushmen, and Veddahs represent this primitive stage more or less completely ; they have apparently not reached the stage where the fact of kinship expresses itself in maternal organization. They live in scattered bands, held together loosely by convenience, safety, and inertia, and the male is the leader, but the leadership of the male in this case, as among animals, is very different from the organized and institutional expression of the male force in sys- tems of political control growing out of achievement. This involves a social history through which these low tribes have absence of social mass, and the collection of social mass took place unconsciously about the female as a universal preliminary of the conscious synthetization of the mass through males. From the side of organization, the negative accretion of popula- tion about female centers and filiation through blood is very
 * not passed. Organization can not proceed very far in the