Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 5.djvu/16

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Three definitions are to be borne in mind throughout the discussion of this question: 1. Society is an aggregation of families, and involves simply the idea of either transient or feeble coherence among its members. 2. Government in its very nature involves the principle of supremacy. 3. A political organization is a society into which have been thrown elements of government, and involves the idea of permanent coherence and unity.

I purpose to show that the institutions of government are a natural growth. The family, society, and the political organization constitute a progressive development consequent upon the action of natural laws. This assertion does not negative the divine origin of government. Fair minded and reflecting men see God behind and working through natural laws.

A study of the writers upon Sociology reveals five facts:

I. History begins with the family.

II. The geographical features of the earth favored the formation of societies.

III. The fauna of the earth compelled the formation of societies.

IV. The nature of man tended to the formation of societies.

V. The nature of man changed the society into the political organization.

"The effect of the evidence derived from comparative jurisprudence," Sir Henry Maine tells us, "is to establish that view of the primeval condition of the human race known as the patriarchal theory." There are verses in the Odyssey of Homer describing the patriarchal state of man. "They had neither assemblies for consultation nor themistes," says the poet, "but every one exercises jurisdiction over his wives and his children, and they pay no regard to one another." In his "Physics and Politics," Bagehot tells us, that the last lesson of prehistoric ethnology confirms the Homeric idea.

The contour of the earth's surface made possible the grouping of families into societies. That within some territory bounded by sea or desert, or in mountain-girt valleys, societies could be formed, is obvious. That families located on opposite sides of mountain chains, seas and deserts, would not unite is equally certain.

Science has established, beyond doubt, that over a large portion of the earth the animal creation contended with primitive man for the occupancy of the soil. Danger, therefore, bonded men into societies. Circumstances, however, demanded only small combinations, and bearing in mind the conservatism which stands prominently out in the better known periods of human history, we are prepared to believe that, within large districts, the primitive families were gathered into scattered societies or tribes. Inductions from the known status of savage people at the present day, assure us that this was the fact.

Again, neighboring tribes, by intermarriage, gave rise to family groups or societies. Kinship, from the first, must have been an important force in the clustering of family units into loose tribal relations. Humboldt remarks that "Savages know only their own family, and a tribe appears to them but a more numerous assemblage of relations." Thus rose the tribe. In the beginning the family sentiment was undoubtedly stronger then the tribal sentiment.