Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 11.djvu/149

Rh Semites, it cannot be sustained. Proof has been given that political coöperation and the accompanying structures arise from the conflicts of social groups with one another. We have seen that this evolves chieftainship, which becomes established when the military activity is constant; and we have seen that, having first politically organized simple groups, this process afterward politically organizes compound groups, and again doubly-compound groups. Though it may be facilitated where "the commonwealth is a collection of persons united by a common descent from the progenitor of an original family," yet, in multitudinous cases, it takes place where no connection of this kind exists among the persons. The members of an Australian tribe which, under a temporary chief, join in battle against those of another tribe have not a common descent, but are alien in blood. If it be said that political functions can in this case scarcely be alleged, then take the case of the Creeks of North America, whose men have various totems implying various ancestries, and whose twenty thousand people, living in seventy villages, have nevertheless evolved for themselves a government of considerable complexity. Or, still better, take the Iroquois, who, similar in their formation of tribes out of intermingled clans of different stocks, were wielded by combined action in war into a league of five (afterward six) nations under a permanent republican government. Indeed, this system of kinship puts relations in political antagonism; so that, as we read in Bancroft of the Kutchins, "there can never be intertribal war without ranging fathers and sons against each other." Even apart from the results of mixed clanships, that instability, which we have seen characterized primitive relations of the sexes, negatives the belief that political coöperation everywhere originates from family coöperation. Instance the above-named Creeks, of whom, according to Schoolcraft, "a large portion of the old and middle-aged men, by frequently changing, have had many different wives, and their children, scattered around the country, are unknown to them."

Thus finding reason to suspect that Sir Henry Maine's theory of the family is not applicable to all human societies, let us proceed to consider it more closely:

He implies that, in the earliest stages, there were definite marital relations. That which he calls "the infancy of society"—"the situation in which mankind disclose themselves at the dawn of their history"—is a situation in which "'every one exercises jurisdiction over his wives and his children, and they pay no regard to one another.'" But in foregoing chapters on "The Primitive Relations of the Sexes," on "Promiscuity," and on "Polyandry," numerous facts have been given, showing that definite, coherent marital relations are preceded by indefinite, incoherent ones; and also that, among the marital relations evolving out of these, there are in many places types of family