Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 11.djvu/276

262 this in the statement of Gomara respecting the Peruvians that "nephews inherit, and not sons, except in the case of the Incas." Still better are we shown it by sundry African states. Among the coast negroes, whose kinships are ordinarily through females, whose various societies are variously governed and most of them very unstable, male descent has been established in some of the kingdoms. The inland negroes, too, similarly retaining as a rule descent in the female line, alike in the state and in the family, have acquired in their public and private arrangements some traits akin to those derived from the patriarchal system; and the like is the case in Congo. Further, in the powerful kingdom of Dahomey, where the monarchy has become stable and absolute, male succession and primogeniture are completely established, and in the less despotically governed Ashantee partially established.

But whether the patriarchal type of family may or may not arise under other conditions, we may safely say that the pastoral life is most favorable to development of it. From the general laws of evolution it is a corollary that there goes on integration of any group of like units simultaneously exposed to forces that are like in kind, amount, and direction; and obviously the members of a wandering family, kept together by joint interests and jointly in antagonism with other such families, will become more integrated than the members of a family associated with other families in a primitive tribe, all the members of which have certain joint interests, and are jointly in antagonism with external tribes. Just as we have seen that larger social aggregates become coherent by the cooperation of their members in conflict with neighboring like aggregates, so with this smallest social aggregate constituted by the nomadic family. Of the differentiations that simultaneously arise, the same may be said. As the government of a larger society is evolved during its struggles with other such societies, so is the government of this smallest society. And as here the society and the family are one, the development of the regulative structure of the society becomes the development of the regulative family structure. Moreover, analogy suggests that the higher organization given by this discipline to the family group makes it a better component of societies afterward formed than are family groups which have not passed through this discipline. Already we have seen that great nations arise only by aggregation and reaggregation: small communities have first to acquire some consolidation and structure; then they admit of union into compound communities, which, when well integrated, may again be compounded into still larger communities; and so on. It now appears that social evolution is most favored when this process begins with the smallest groups—the families: such groups, made coherent and definite in the way described, and afterward compounded and recompounded, having originated the highest societies.