Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/643

Rh KTHNOGBAPHY (521 invested with the power of life and death over his wife, his children, and his slaves, a priest and an offerer of sacrifice, when officiating before his sacred hearth. The rex or basileus, acting on behalf of the whole city, was the representative paterfamilias, acting in the name and on behalf of all his brethren. Property is an institution whu h stands second in importance to none. Property went on increasing in amount from the hunting and fishing period to the pastoral, and from the pastoral to the agricultural not to stop there. Riches increased in proportion to the intelligence and to the amount of work done. As riches accumulated, so increased not only the greed but, what is an apparent con tradiction, the need for them. The men in authority, the strong, took more than their share, the weak growing con stantly weaker, the poorer becoming either paupers or slaves. When riches were made fairly abundant by agriculture, the pristine gens with maternal kinship had to give way to the gens with paternal kinship ; for it was contrary to logic that the privileges of riches and power should be still bestowed by enslaved women, when the circumstances of family life established a sufficient certitude of paternity. Thus internal revolutions modified totally the character of the gens in the course of time. It had begun by being feminine in character, it ended in being exclusively masculine. Originally property was held in common by all gentiles; by degrees its ownership became restricted to constantly diminishing circles of relations, and finally an end was made of collective property ; the principle of private ownership obtained the victory, and reigned supreme as it does now. And when, in the leading states, the principle of collective property which underlay the gens had lost its vital force, the gens fell or was overthrown and crumbled to dust. This mighty fabric, the most considerable perhaps of .all human institutions, has broken down everywhere, but it has not been totally destroyed. Its debris lie broadcast over the earth, from Rajputana to Scotland and Ireland, and thence to America. In the still existing House or Village Communities in the East and West, as described by Sir Henry Maine, we see living remnants of that institution in which formerly all ideas of peace, industry, justice, and progress had centred. Once the gens was all, and it was believed that it would remain all to all time. At that period, the gens was a political and a religious no less than a family institution ; each gens was a complete state in itself. Where the gentes absorbed all the members of the tribe, leaving nobody out of its pale, and giving a fair share to all, the institution was perfectly compatible with progress, at least for a long time. But it happened other wise in many instances, and especially among the gentes which are the best knfnvn to us, those of Greece and Rome. There the gentes took advantage of the fact that they were the first organized body to arrogate all power, and most obstinatuly they kept it, making themselves a privileged class, ruling a mob of paupers, exiles, fugitives, runaway slaves, and their progeny the proletariate. Theoretically the gens might have endured for ever, if it had consented to take up outsiders. But collective bodies lack generosity, especially when they are powerful. The gentiles went on increasing the number of non-gentiles by their raids and wars, conquering and enslaving other free men, until the privileged ones were outnumbered, outwitted, and finally ousted from power by the multitude of the non- possessors. And thus sovereignty, which for long ages rested upon the family system, rests now upon the terri torial system. VII. Intellectual Development, Language, Literature, and Arts. To no other auxiliary science is ethnology so much indebted as to philology. Not long ago the two sciences were confounded with each other, and purely linguistic disquisitions went under the name of &quot;ethno graphic researches,&quot; as in the Atlas of Balbi, where the word &quot; ethnography&quot; occurs perhaps for the first time (in 1826). Formerly the words &quot;nations&quot; and &quot;languages&quot; were synonymous. In Genesis the confusion of the tongues is said to have caused the separation of mankind into nations. A language is to be considered as the collective brain of a nation ; the vocabulary shows the richness of its ideas, the syntax how it works them. While our lexicographers count their words by the ten thousands, we are assured that the savage is scarcely able to use more than twelve hundred words, and that many English rustics have not more than four or five hundred words at their disposal. A nation s language is the sum of its developed intellect, the record of its previous intellectual efforts. From that store of accumulated ideas and feelings our children draw the best part of their information, the most of their morals. Our mother tongue is our intellectual motherland. For a long time, the element of race had been considered to be the greatest of all ethnological factors. Some even drew between Aryans and non-Aryans a line which would have been scarcely sharper if it had been between men and brutes. But after all, affinity of blood seems to have much less influence on men than the affinity of reli gions, and the affinity of religions less than the affinity of languages, at least in modern times, for this reason, that language is the sum and religion a part only of our thoughts. A curious example of the power of language is observed in Roumania. Its inhabitants claim descent from Italian colonists, an obscure and certainly very mixed stock. For a time they were thought to have disappeared among the Slavs, whose Greek religion had already conquered them, and already acted powerfully on their language. But the language which had been brought to the plains of Moldo-Wallachia by poor soldiers and ignorant peasants stubbornly resisted extinction, and at last obtained the advantage over its invader, because as a vehicle of thought it brought with it the ideas and memories which are preserved in the pages of Virgil and Cicero, and finally the Roumanians elected to enter into the fellowship of Latin nations. It is the English language which in the United States has welded into one nation the motley crowd of immigrants landing from so many countries and professing so many religions. Ethnologists, as such, are not concerned to inquire into the difficult problem of the origin of languages, which is to be worked out by the professed philologists. The solu tions, however, which seem self-evident to linguists on mere philologic grounds, if they do not tally with ethnolo gical experience, will have their acceptance postponed by ethnologists until further examination. For example, some authors will have it that nations must be considered as belonging to different races, and descended from ancestors of totally inconsonant minds, if one uses as a prefix what another would use as a suffix, or if one puts the attribute after the substantive when another puts it before. Between the isolating, the agglutinative, and the inflexional languages they have drawn the same distinctions as those established by the botanists between acotyledonous, monocotyle- donous, and dicotyledonous plants ; and they want the ethno logists to classify nations accordingly, the last of the three, i.e., the inflexional, being supposed to have a pre ponderance as great as that of the vertebrates over the in vertebrates. And, furthermore, considering that the in flexional languages are less sonorous and abundant in forms than they were in their earlier stages, philologists took much to heart what they regarded as a linguistic deteriora tion. From that degeneration theory there is an easy transi-