The same tendencies, under similar circumstances, where the tribes were not crowded or in fear of warlike neighbours, was noticed among the Red Indians some forty years ago. Now, I suppose, instances would be rare.
“When a nation of Indians becomes too numerous conveniently to procure subsistence from its own hunting-grounds, it is no uncommon occurrence for it to send out a colony, or, in other words, to separate into tribes.... The tribe so separated maintains all its relations independent of the parent nation, though the most friendly intercourse is commonly maintained, and they are almost uniformly allies. Separations sometimes take place from party dissensions, growing generally out of the jealousies of the principal chiefs, and, not unfrequently, out of petty quarrels. In such instances, in order to prevent the unnecessary and wanton effusion of blood, and consequent enfeebling of the nation, the weaker party moves off usually without the observance of much ceremony.”[26]
Mr Grote in his “Plato”[27] says—
“There existed,” even “in his (Plato’s) time, a great variety of distinct communities—some in the simplest, most patriarchal, cyclopian condition, nothing more than families; some highly advanced in civilisation, with its accompanying good and evil, some in each intermediate stage between these two extremes. Each little family or sept exists at first separately, with a patriarch whom all implicitly obey, and peculiar customs of its own. Several of these septs gradually coalesce together into a community, choosing one or a few lawgivers to adjust and modify their respective customs into harmonious order.”[28]
In the situations, however, where the more powerful families had seized the vantage-ground, or established themselves in the richest and most coveted valleys, the tendency to consolidation and permanent settlement would have more rapidly manifested itself. As the tendency to family dispersion became restrained, and its scope restricted, disputes as to meum and tuum would have become more frequent as between families, some more central authority than the family headship would have been demanded for the protection, discrimination, and regulation of property. In these instances the state may be said to have arisen out of the expansion of the family into the tribes—the families, probably, never having ceased to dwell together in semi-aggregation; and, when greater concentration was required, they simply had to fall back upon the patriarchal chieftain. We seem to see a tradition of this in the Anax Andron.
But equally as regards the rest there must inevitably have come a time when, as the world became crowded, the same necessity of defending their possessions, would have caused families, among whom there was no affinity of race, to coalesce, intermix, succumb, and form communities and states.
These two modes of settlement into communities and states were, however, essentially dissimilar, and the basis thus laid would have remained permanently different. The one was the basis of custom, the other of contract; the one the settlement of the East, the other of the West; and it will be seen, I think, that whilst the one was more favourable to the conservation of traditions of religion and history, the other would have better preserved the tradition of right. These are points to which I shall return in a subsequent chapter, when I shall avail myself of the investigations of Sir Henry Maine.
This simple outline, however, of human history, conformable, as I believe it to be, with the scriptural narrative, conflicts with at least three theories now much in vogue. The first, which is substantially that of Sir John Lubbock, Mr Mill,[29] and Mr B. Gould, is thus conveniently summarised by Mr Hepworth Dixon.[30]
“Every one who has read the annals of our race—a page of nature with its counterfoil in the history of everything having life—is aware that, in our progress from the savage to the civilised state, man has had to pass through three grand stages, corresponding, as it were, to his childhood, to his youth, and to his manhood. In the first stage of his career he is a hunter, living mainly by the chase; in the second, he is a herdsman; ... in the third stage, he is a husbandman.... Then these conditions of human life may be considered as finding their purest types in such races as the Iroquois, the Arabian, the Gothic, in their present stage; but each condition is, in itself and for itself, an affair of development and not of race. The Arab, who is now a shepherd, was once a hunter. The Saxon, who is now a cultivator of the soil, was first a hunter, then a herdsman, before he became a husbandman. Man’s progress from stage to stage is continuous in its course, obeying the laws of physical and moral change. It is slow, it is uniform, it is silent, it is unseen. In one word, it is growth.... These three stages in our progress upward are strongly marked; the interval dividing an Iroquois from an Arab being as wide as that which separates an Arab from a Saxon.”
Now, in the first place, I must remark that the Iroquois and the Arab have never progressed;[31] neither does the Arab at the present show any signs of a transition to the third stage of necessary growth, nor does Mr Hepworth Dixon, although he gives some sound practical advice as to the best mode in which the red man is to be restrained, venture to suggest any mode by which he is to be reclaimed from the first to the third stage, either with or without a transition through the second stage of development. The conclusion therefore, one would think, would be inevitable that it is an affair of race and not of development. The Arab and the Iroquois, after the lapse of so many centuries, are still found with the evidences of primitive life strong upon them; and so, I imagine, we shall find it wherever we come upon a pure race of homogeneous origin. On the contrary, we shall find that mixed races, by the very law and reason of their admixture, have shown the greatest adaptibility, and, whenever circumstances were favourable, very rapid growth. Again, I very much question whether the three stages, or rather three phases of life were ever, as a rule, progressive; and whether, in the cases in which they might chance to have been successive, anything occurred in the transition at all resembling an uniform law of growth. It is very much more probable that the three were from the earliest period contemporaneous[32]—“and Abel was a shepherd, and Cain an husbandman” (Gen. iv.)—the determination of the sons to the avocations of shepherd, husbandman, and hunter respectively (the latter most probably being the last selected), being influenced by taste, character, and the division of the inheritance, the authority of the father, the geographical conditions of the route, and chance circumstances.