Page:The Aryan Household.djvu/18

6 which it was the expansion, marked the boundary line of human sympathy in the archaic world. Within the clan there were the truest loyalty and devotion. Beyond the clan there was at best absolute indifference, and usually active hostility. The clan was settled upon land of which it, in its corporate character, had the exclusive ownership, and which it shared among its members according to certain customary rules. It possessed an organization sufficient for its ordinary wants, and was essentially autonomous. It had, too, its gradations of rank. Every clan contained nobles—that is, men of pure blood and of long descent, and free men whose bloody though good, was not maintained through the necessary number of generations. But it contained others besides the men of pure blood. These were dependents, varying in degree from the honoured guest to the mere slave. Some of these dependents, who were personally free, and were settled on the land, acquired, by a residence extending over three generations, rights of inheritance in the soil; and could not, according to general custom, be removed from their holdings so long as they performed their customary duties. But although property was thus generally held by corporate households, agencies were at work which tended to introduce separate interests. The old customs were inflexible. They admitted of no deviation, and of no extension. Accordingly, their rules of property applied only to certain specified objects. These objects, including generally the house and the land, with certain rights incident thereto, and the instruments of cultivation, descended from father to son. They were the corpus, so to speak, of the household estate, and were intended to be inalienable. But other kinds of property, otherwise acquired, were not within the custom. Two kinds of property seem thus to have grown up together, both of which,