Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/116

 that communal ancestor from whose loins the group is sprung or thought to be sprung, whose imaginary presence sanctifies every festival of common joys, whose favour is to be propitiated in every common affliction, and to whom, in company with others long since gathered to their fathers, it is the destiny of the clansman, sooner or later, to return. Unformulated in any doctrine, but not on that account less real, unwritten in any code, but not on that account less lasting, this unity of blood is the central conception of clan life, the central point to and from which sets the current of the clansmen's deepest feelings.

The outward marks of this common kinship are numerous. Common religious rites, or sacra gentilicia, bind the clansmen in a fellowship of ancestral worship and the village community to its eponymous ancestor. Reciprocal obligations of defence and vengeance unite the brotherhood, whether it consists of Hebrew or Arab Semites, of Greek or German Aryans, of kinsmen in Central Asia or in the wilds of the New World. Rights or obligations of marriage within the clan everywhere attest the same communal exclusiveness; and some forms of clan life would even lead us to believe that the brotherhood once lived under a common roof, and shared not only their sacred festivals but even their ordinary meals. Conspicuous, however, among these signs of communal kinship is an economic feature of the settled clan which living scholars have investigated with equal patience and learning—the common ownership of land. This feature M. de Laveleye, for example, in his Primitive Property, and Sir Henry Maine, in his Village Communities and Early History of Institutions, have illustrated by examples taken from every quarter of the globe—from India and Russia, from the Germanic Mark,