Page:The State Its Historic Role.djvu/8

 human aspect already lived in societies. Man did not create society; society is anterior to man.

We also know today—anthropology has clearly demonstrated it—that the starting point of humanity was not the family, but the clan, the tribe. The paternal family such as we have it, or such as is depicted in Hebrew tradition, appeared only very much later. Men lived tens of thousands of years in the stage of clan or tribe, and during that first stage—let us call it primitive or savage tribe, if you will—man already developed a whole series of institutions, habits, and customs, far anterior to the paternal family institutions.

In those tribes, the separate family existed no more than it exists among so many other sociable mammalia. Divisions in the midst of the tribe itself were formed by generations; and since the earliest periods of tribal life limitations were established to hinder marriage relations between divers generations, while they were freely practised between members of the same generation. Traces of that period are still extant in certain contemporary tribes, and we find them again in the language, the customs, the superstitions of nations who were far more advanced in civilisation.

The whole tribe hunted and harvested in common, and when they were satisfied they gave themselves up with passion to their dramatic dances. Nowadays we still find tribes, very near to this primitive phase, driven back to the outskirts of the large continents, or in Alpine regions, the least accessible of our globe.

The accumulation of private property could not take place, because each thing that had been the personal property of a member of the tribe was destroyed or burned on the spot where his corpse was buried. This is even still done by gipsies in England, and the funeral rites of the "civilised" still bear its traces: the Chinese burn paper models of what the dead possessed; and we lead the military chief's horse, and carry his sword and decorations as far as the grave. The meaning of the institution is lost: only the form survives.

Far from professing contempt for human life, these primitive individuals had a horror of blood and murder. Shedding blood was considered a deed of such gravity that each drop of blood shed—not only the blood of men, but also that of certain animals—required that the aggressor should lose an equal quantity of blood.

In fact, a murder within the tribe itself was a deed absolutely unknown; you may see it till now, among the Inoïts or Esquimaux—those survivors of the stone age that inhabit the Arctic regions. But when tribes of different origin, colour, or tongue met during their migrations,