Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu/352

338 and he has increased losses from enemies and wild animals; so that the benefits of accumulation are kept within narrow limits. Only as the agricultural state is reached, and only as the tenure of land passes from the tribal form, through the family form, to the individual form, is there a widening of the sphere for the proprietary sentiment.

So that the primitive man, distinguished by his improvidence, distinguished also by deficiency of that desire to own which checks improvidence, is, by his circumstances, debarred from the experiences which develop this desire and diminish the improvidence.

Let us turn now to those emotional traits which directly affect the formation of social groups. Varieties of mankind, as we now find them, are social in different degrees; and, further, they are distinguished by different degrees of independence—are here tolerant of restraint and here intolerant of it. Clearly, the proportions between these two characteristics must greatly affect the social union.

Describing the Mantras, indigenes of the Malay Peninsula, Père Bourien says: "Liberty seems to be to them a necessity of their very existence;" "every individual lives as if there were no other person in the world but himself;" they separate if they dispute; So, too, of the wild men in the interior of Borneo, "who do not associate with each other;" and whose children, when "old enough to shift for themselves, usually separate, neither one afterward thinking of the other." A nature of this kind manifestly precludes social development; and it shows its effects in the solitary families of the wood-Veddahs, or those of the Bushmen, whom Arbrousset describes as "independent and poor beyond measure, as if they had sworn to remain always free and without possessions." Of sundry races that remain in a low state, this trait is remarked; as in South America, among the Araucanians, "the Mapuché is impatient of contradiction, and brooks no command;" as, according to Bates, among the Indians of Brazil, who, tractable when quite young, begin to display "impatience of all restraint at puberty;" as among the Caribs, who were "impatient under the least infringement" of their independence. Sundry of the Hill-tribes of India, too, exhibit a kindred nature. The savage Bhils have "a natural spirit of independence;" the Bodo and Dhimal "resist injunctions injudiciously urged, with dogged obstinacy;" and the Lepchas "undergo great privations rather than submit to oppression." This impediment to social evolution we meet with again among some nomadic races. "A Bedouin," says Burckhardt, "will not submit to any command, but readily yields to persuasion;" and he is said by Palgrave to have "a high appreciation of national and personal liberty," and "a remarkable freedom from any thing like caste feeling in what concerns ruling families and dynasties." That this moral trait is injurious during early stages of social progress, is in some cases observed by travelers, as by Earl, who says of the New Guinea people that their "impatience of control" precludes organization. Not, indeed, that