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 684 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

father depended, and with the desire for power and success which could be obtained mainly through a large following of wives, sons, daughters, and dependents. The principle which held together this aggregate was in theory the worship of a com- mon ancestor, to whom the aggregate belonged as his private property. The patriarch himself was only the priestly mediator between that ancestral proprietor and the living generation. In practice he was, therefore, the living proprietor, and he exercised direct coercive power over the group by means of physical pen- alties. It was on this simple basis that the organization of the family was effected. Implicit obedience to one man, the priest- father, provided the unity and centralization needed for survival. The ownership of the material basis of the family — its lands, houses, subsistence, earnings — by this same ancestor, and the unquestioned administration of the same by the living priest- father, placed in his hands also the power of indirect coercion through material penalties, as well as direct coercion through physical penalties. This is the social organization so completely explained by Fustel de Coulanges.

Here was a complete blending of all social institutions and all personal beliefs and desires in a simple centralized group. The theory of its union, however, was blood-relationship traced through male ancestry. Seeing, now, that the struggle for existence requires the increasing size of the group and the monopoly of its organizing principle throughout the social body, the primitive man is met by the fact that blood-relationship is physically limited. He resorts, therefore, to the fiction of adoption and the ceremony of initiation, by which the ances- tral blood and worship are transmitted to the new accessions. This applies even to slaves. The organizing principle of blood-relationship, thus fictitiously enlarged, is now capable of indefinite expansion, but a new limit again is reached, namely, the scarcity of land. The Claudian gens which moved to Rome, and certain of the gentes of the Albanians, mentioned by Strabo,' numbered as high as ten thousand souls, but it is doubtful whether this number was ever exceeded. If blood is

' LiPPERT, Allgm. C-esch. des Priesterthums, Vol. 11. p. 572.