Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 11.djvu/279

Rh unit. But when the imperfectly-formed families with their domesticated animals, and the family and the society, are thus separate into distinct groups, made identical—when the coöperations carried on are between individuals domestically related as well as socially related, then the family becomes defined, compact, organized; and its controlling agency gains strength because it is at once parental and political. This organization which the pastoral group gets by being at once family and society, and which is gradually perfected by conflict and survival of the fittest, it carries into settled life. But settled life entails multiplication into numerous such groups adjacent to one another; and in these changed circumstances each of the groups is sheltered from some of the actions which originated its organization and exposed to other actions which tend to disorganize it. Though there still arise quarrels among the multiplying families, yet, as their blood-relationship is now a familiar thought, which persists longer than it would have done had they wandered away from one another generation after generation, the check to antagonism is greater. Further, the worship of a common ancestor, in which they can now more readily join at settled intervals, acts as a restraint on their hatreds, and so holds them together. Again, the family is no longer liable to be separately attacked by enemies; but a number of the adjacent families are simultaneously invaded and simultaneously resist: coöperation among them is induced. Throughout subsequent stages of social growth this coöperation increases; and the families jointly exposed to like external forces tend to integrate. Already we have seen that by a kindred process such communities as tribes, as feudal lordships, as small kingdoms, become consolidated into larger communities; and that along with the consolidation caused by coöperation, primarily for offense and defense, and subsequently for other purposes, there goes a gradual obliteration of the divisions between them, and a substantial fusion. Here we recognize the like process as taking place with these smallest groups. Quite harmonizing with this general interpretation are the special interpretations which Sir Henry Maine gives of the decline of the patria potestas among the Romans. He points out how father and son had to perform their civil and military functions on a footing of equality wholly unlike their domestic footing; and how the consequent separate acquisition of authority, power, spoils, etc., by the son, gradually undermined the paternal despotism. Individuals of the family ceasing to work together exclusively in their unlike relations to one another, and coming to work together under like relations to state authority and to enemies, the public coöperation and subordination grew at the expense of the family cooperation and subordination. Not only militant activities, but also industrial activities in the large aggregates eventually formed, conduced to this result. In a recent work on "Bosnia and Herzegovina," Mr. Arthur J. Evans, describing the Slavonic