Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/620

602 reacting upon one another. The elemental forms and tokens of this organism are family life, ownership, and government. Each of these presupposes coöperation and contribution at all stages in the history of society, though under different forms; each of them implies the distribution of mankind into small groups rather than into large masses of individual atoms. It is difficult to say that any one of these original elements has precedence in point of time over any one of the others. It is more true to say that, when once they are all found to be in existence, the state has then and there come into being. A very short time passes before another element—that of contract—implied in all progressive industrial coöperation, also comes to the surface.

There are thus formed in the primitive state a certain number of elemental institutions which may be looked upon, not in any sense as the creation of law, but as existing independently of law; for the spontaneous arbitrary action of a primitive government resembles what is now called "administration" rather than law. It is true, however, that law, in the immature form of regulated usage, will be found to be one of the earliest of all the ingredients of the state. It will be, indeed, even from the first, the regulator and the guide of the other institutions with which it is contemporary, but is in no sense their parent or solitary guardian. Nevertheless, as time goes on, the support that law gives to the integrity of family life, to property, to industrial and commercial relations, and to government, becomes important in the highest degree. Indeed, the prominence of the legal supervision exercised in a highly-developed state over all these departments, affords an apology for the familiar notion that they are all the arbitrary creation of law and depend for their continued subsistence upon no greater or deeper sanction than that of physical force.

If it be true, then, as this last theory asserts, that in every state there are a limited number of great pivots, or turning-points, round which human society revolves, and the law only plays a subordinate part in regulating and protecting the grand mechanism, it is obvious that a permanent and universal body of facts relative to law may be at once anticipated to result from the permanence and universality of the great groups of facts with which it happens to be mainly conversant. Experience and observation confirm this anticipation. Every known system of law, both of ancient and modern times, in all parts of the world, and in all stages of national development, distributes itself into the main divisions of laws determining—1. The nature, functions, and limitations of the governing authority; 2. The forms and conditions of ownership, whether of land or other things; 3. The relations of family life; and 4. The binding force of voluntary promises or contracts. These several topics afford a natural method of distribution applicable to every legal system whatever; and each several topic, according to its peculiar nature and to the incidents by which it is