Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/203

 NUMBER AS DETERMINING FORM OF GROUP IQI

a totally different result, and although without materially prac- tical relationship to the subdivision into the ten individuals, appears to me to have been derived psychologically from the latter. As the Jews returned from the second exile, 42,360 Jews with their slaves, they were so subdivided that a tenth, selected by lot, took up their abode in Jerusalem, the remaining nine-tenths in the country. These were too few for the capit.il, wherefore there was immediately a taking of thought about the increase of the population of Jerusalem. The power of the decimal principle, as a basis of social division, seems thus to have operated blindly against the demands of practice.

The hundred, derived from the decimal principle, is primarily and essentially also a means of subdivision, and historically indeed the most important. I have already observed that it immediately became the conceptual substitute for subdivision in general, so that its name remained attached to the subgroup even when the latter contained considerably more or fewer members. The Hundreds appeared most decisively perhaps in the important role that they play in the government of Anglo- Saxon England at the same time as the idea of the subordi- nate group in general, whose inner meaning their incomplete realization does not alter. It is, in this instance, very notable that the Hundreds in ancient Peru still voluntarily paid their tribute to the Incas, with the exertion of all their powers, after they were reduced to a fourth of their typical number. In this case the fundamental sociological fact is that these territorial associations were regarded as unities beyond their members. Since, however, the liability to taxation, as it appears, rested not on the society, as such, but upon its hundred participants, the assumption of this obligation by the remaining twenty-five shows the more distinctly that the hundred was regarded as a unity of absolute and essential solidarity. The strong centripe- tality which thus rules this structure enforces the suggestion that its significance is to be found, not merely in its utility as a principle of division, which is at best something external to it, and with which it serves the larger circumscribing group. Apart from this, therefore, it is found, in fact, that the number of one