[139] Markham, ‘Geographical Positions of the Tribes which formed the Empire of the Yncas,’ in Jour. Roy. Geo. Soc. xli. 287 sqq.
[140] Simcox, op. cit. ii. 10, 13.
[141] Kuenen, Religion of Israel, i. 133.
[142] Zimmer, Altindisches Leben, pp. 158, 192 sq.
[143] Leist, Græco-italische Rechtsgeschichte, p. 109 sqq.
The development of the State tended to weaken or destroy the smaller units of which it was composed. The central power, hostile to separatism, naturally endeavoured to appropriate the authority invested in the latter, and in a well-governed state these on their part had little reason to resist. The main object of the clan, phratry, and tribe was to protect their respective members; hence they became superfluous in the presence of a powerful national government which unselfishly and impartially looked after the interests of its various subjects. Adam Smith contrasts the strong clan-feeling which still in the eighteenth century prevailed among the Scotch Highlanders with the little regard felt for remote relatives by the English, and observes that in countries where the authority of the law is not sufficiently strong to give security to every member of the State the different branches of the same family choose to live in the neighbourhood of one another, their association being frequently necessary for their common defence; whereas in a country like England, where the authority of the law was well established, “the descendants of the same family, having no such motive for keeping together, naturally separate and disperse, as interest or inclination may direct.”[144] It seems also probable that the persistency of the village community or the gentile system among the Hindus and Slavs has been largely due to the weakness of the State or to the badness of the government.
[144] Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, p. 326 sq.
As the larger units, so the family also was influenced by the rise of the State, but originally in quite the opposite direction. Whilst the former dwindled away, the family grew in importance. Nowhere do we find the family-tie stronger, nowhere does the father or eldest male ascendant possess greater power than in the archaic State. In a previous chapter I have already tried to explain this singular fact. I pointed out that in early society there seems to be a certain antagonism between the family and the clan, that the family was strengthened because the clan was weakened, that the father became a patriarch only as the inheritor of the authority which formerly belonged to the clan. But we have also noticed that at a higher stage the family again lost in importance.[145]
[145] Supra, [i. 627 sq.]
It seems that the tribes which united into one nation or state were normally, in the first instance, branches of the same stock, living in the same neighbourhood and speaking the same language, though with dialectic differences. Like the smaller units, such a state was no doubt frequently adulterated by the amalgamation of aliens, but here again fictions were substituted for realities, and the foreign extraction was forgotten. The case was different, however, when the commonwealth was formed or aggrandised by the subjugation of a strange race. Instead of being adopted into the circle of the conquerors, the subdued people were treated as their inferiors in blood, civic rights were denied to them, and in many cases they were kept in servitude; thus even here the principle of a common origin as the base of citizenship was preserved, the conquerors being the only citizens in the full sense of the term. But however strong and durable similar barriers may be, they are not imperishable. The different races inhabiting the same country under the same government tend to draw nearer each other, the inferior race is incorporated with the nation, and local proximity instead of descent at last becomes the basis of community in political functions. This change, however, was neither so radical nor so startling as it has been represented to be;[146] fictions on a large scale still formed a bridge between ancient and modern ideas. Sir Henry Maine says that we cannot now hope to understand the good faith of the fiction by which in early times the incoming population were assumed to be descended from the same stock as the people on whom they were engrafted.[147] But is this good faith more astonishing than the readiness with which a common language, in spite of the most obvious facts to the contrary, is even now constantly taken as the sign of a common origin? Though identity of language, even in the case of whole peoples, proves nothing more than contact or neighbourhood, a person’s mother-tongue popularly decides his race, and language and nationality are regarded almost as synonymous. Genealogical fictions, then, are not merely a thing of the past, nor have they ceased to influence political ideas. The modern theory of nationalism vindicates the right of the strongest nationality to absorb the other nationalities living within the same state by a method of compulsory engraftment, and this can be effected only by their accepting its language. But this theory is not so much concerned with language as such, as with language as an emblem of nationality. At the bottom of it is the narrow feeling of racial intolerance, quite ready however to be appeased by a fiction. The doctrine of nationalism is the spectre of the same political principle—the principle of a common descent, either real or fictitious—on which states were founded and governed when civilisation was in its cradle.