Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 18.djvu/307

Rh and multiplication of those family bonds which check disruption. Where promiscuity is prevalent, or where marriages are temporary, the known relationships are relatively few and not close; and there is little more social cohesion than results from belonging to the same type of man. Polyandry, especially of the higher kind, produces relationships of some definiteness, which admit of being traced further; so serving better to tie the social group together. And a greater advance in the nearness and the number of family connections results from polygyny. But, as was shown, it is from monogamy that there arise family connections which are at once the most definite and the most wide spreading in their ramifications; and out of monogamic families are developed the largest and most coherent societies. In two allied yet distinguishable ways does monogamy favor social solidarity.

Unlike the children of the polyandrous family, who are something less than half brothers and sisters, and unlike the children of the polygamous family, most of whom are only half brothers and sisters, the children of the monogamous family are, in the great majority of cases, all of the same blood on both sides. Being thus themselves more closely related, it follows that their clusters of children are more closely related; and where, as happens in early stages, these clusters of children when grown up continue to form a community, and labor together, they are united alike by their kinships arid by their industrial interests. Though with the growth of a family group into a gens which spreads, the industrial interests divide, yet these kinships prevent the divisions from becoming as marked as they would otherwise become. And, similarly, when the gens, in course of time, develops into the tribe. Nor is this all. If local circumstances bring together several such tribes, which are still allied in blood, though more remotely, it results that when, seated side by side, they are gradually fused, partly by interspersion and partly by intermarriage, the compound society formed, united by numerous and complicated links of kinship as well as by political interests, is more strongly bound together than it would otherwise be. Dominant ancient societies illustrate this truth. Says Grote: "All that we hear of the most ancient Athenian laws is based upon the gentile and phratric divisions, which are treated throughout as extensions of the family." Similarly, according to Mommsen, on the "Roman household was based the Roman state, both as respected its constituent elements and its form. The community of the Roman people arose out of the junction (in whatever way brought about) of such ancient clanships as the Romilii, Voltinii, Fabii, etc." And Sir Henry Maine has shown in detail the ways in which the simple family passes into the house community, and eventually the village community. Though, in presence of the evidence furnished by races having irregular sexual relations, we can not allege that sameness of blood is the primary reason for political coöperation—though in numerous tribes which have not risen into the pastoral state,