Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 4.djvu/532

 5 1 2 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

has entered upon a predatory life only after a considerable period of peaceable industrial life, and after having achieved a considerable development of social structure under the regime of peace and industry, whereas the unqualified prevalence of the patriarchate, together with the male household, may be taken to indicate that the predatory phase was entered early, culturally speaking.

Where the patriarchal system is in force in fully developed form, including the paternal household, and hampered with no indubitable survivals of a maternal household or a maternal sys- tem of relationship, the presumption would be that the people in question has entered upon the predatory culture early, and has adopted the institutions of private property and class pre- rogative at an early stage of its economic development. On the other hand, where there are well-preserved traces of a maternal household, the presumption is that the predatory phase has been entered by the community in question at a relatively late point in its life history, even if the patriarchal system is, and long has been, the prevalent system of relationship. In the latter case the community, or the group of tribes, may, perhaps for geographical reasons, not have independently attained the predatory culture in accentuated form, but may at a relatively late date have contracted the agnatic system and the paternal household through contact with another, higher, or character- istically different, culture, which has included these institutions among its cultural furniture. The required contact would take place most effectually by way of invasion and conquest by an alien race occupying the higher plane or divergent line of culture. Something of this kind is the probable explanation, for instance, of the equivocal character of the household and relationship system in the early Germanic culture, especially as it is seen in such outlying regions as Scandinavia. The evi- dence, in this latter case, as in some other communities lying farther south, is somewhat obscure, but it points to a long-con- tinued coexistence of the two forms of the household ; of which the maternal seems to have held its place most tenaciously among the subject or lower classes of the population, while the