Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/340

328 Thus in the heart of the old vague social group there grew up intimately associated family groups of increasing size and importance. The double link of property and blood-relationship rendered this association a strong one, and we seem to see the old social group gradually breaking up into its elements, with diversity of interests and a degree of hostility between the separate family groups. Each of these, in its turn, grew larger and larger, until it became a community in itself, held together by a strongly-felt sense of blood-relationship, and quite able to hold its own against other similar groups.

The most archaic of these communal groups is the patriarchal, that still found throughout nomadic Asia. It is distinctly based on family relations, recognizes a common ancestor, is governed by the living representative of this ancestor, and strongly holds to the fiction of blood relationship, even in adopted members of the tribe. Again, all property is held and all labor performed in common, and for the good of the community, while the sentiment of individualism is very greatly reduced. This is not now so strictly the case as it probably was of old, yet the principle of communalism is still strongly maintained.

Yet, as in the beavers, so in the patriarchal horde, there are minor groups within the group, tent-families like the lodge-family of the beavers, with more immediate family links than those of the larger group. Among the primitive Aryans this minor division had made great progress. The separation of the patriarchal community into minor family groups, with special interests and common property, had become strongly marked, and a reverse process of development, from communalism toward individualism, had fairly set in. The Aryan village community had still many interests in common, and held the fiction of a common ancestor. Yet it had taken a step in advance of the stage reached by the communal animals, toward the higher and special development of modern human society.

Between the patriarchal and the Aryan systems of association stands that of the Indian clan, which possessed features of both. The general family group was broken up into smaller family groups, as well defined as the Aryan, yet the division of property had not advanced so far. And not only property was held to a considerable extent in common, but common habitation existed among many tribes, of which we have the most marked and striking instance in the great common habitations of the Pueblo Indians of to-day.

In the later stages of human development there has been a strongly declared progress toward individualism, at least in property and political relations. The family association has vanished, and has been replaced by the territorial, which is the link of connection in all modern civilized societies, and the latest outgrowth of the principle of animal association. Yet industrially the communal principle holds good, though it has assumed a new and wider phase than that of old. Though the idea of community in property has lost its force, the