Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 26, 1915.djvu/352

 342 The Religious Basis of Social Union.

kingship. What is the basis of social union ? is it force or feeling ? is it calculation of interest or affection ? If Society and the State — I here use them for the moment as synonymous — have ceased to have a moral appeal, how can this be restored ? Let us look at the earliest known development of man.

1. Primitive Society beyond the family is artificial, and depends on contract, whether tacit or explicit ; the jealous, polygamous, patriarchal sire drove out the adolescent males, and they are only allowed to come back on condi- tion of ' avoidance ' between brothers and sisters, between sons and their fathers' wives. (I need not perhaps, before such an audience, detail the disproof of the ' promiscuous undivided commune ' or ' horde ' which some have supposed to be the starting-point.)

2. When the patriarch dies, the brothers, who are also the Elders of the group — the oligarchy, the gerontocracy, the 'whigs' — succeeded to an absolutism 'in commission,' and a second covenant is needed between equal members of a corporation who must surrender, to belong to it, a portion of their rights and personal freedom. In laying down the law or custom for the juniors in effect they bind themselves, and no member of a Senate of Elders ever gets his own way. But that group succeeded and survived where first, the aged father allowed his adult sons to stop on conditions or on ' parole,' second, when brethren (unlike Joseph's) held together, and refrained from the temptation to * fall out by the way.'

3. Meantime the Sisters, really the stationary element, the aborigines of this early group, rose in value when suitors came in begging to be allowed to live as humble dependents of their spouses and brothers-in-law in beena- marriage — as Jacob dwelt with Laban. Their children will not really be theirs ; this fatherhood without rights has nothing to do with ' primitive promiscuity ' (as was once thought); merely the children born to the ladies of