This was the ancient way in which all the towns of this race were built. As the towns increased in size, other gates were opened, and streets laid out, but always after the same general plan. And as a family never stayed indoors when it was possible to work or play in the open air, so the colonists did not stay inside their wall when they could go out on the common land and make it fruitful. Their descendants are seldom contented to live inside walls and streets, where they [pg 116]can have no land of their own. They find homes outside, where they can have land to dig up and plant and tend and watch, season after season,—and in the thousands of years since they began to plant and to reap, they have gone almost everywhere in the world.
X
THE KINSMEN
While the colonists were clearing the land on the Square Hill, building huts and laying out farms, they saw nothing of Romulus and Remus. The old shepherd Faustulus came up now and then to look at the work as it went on, and plainly thought these newcomers wonderful and superior beings. But the wolf’s foster children were fighters, not husbandmen, and this work was not in their line at all.
The fathers of the colony were not altogether sorry that this was so. They felt that if the hunters, woodsmen, shepherds, soldiers of fortune, and outlawed men Romulus commanded should happen to quarrel with peaceable people like the settlers, it might create a very unpleasant state of things. The brothers themselves were friendly enough, but it was not certain whether they could keep their men from plunder or fighting if they tried. Such bands, so far as Colonus [pg 118]and his friends had known of them, were like a pack of wolves,—the chiefs only held their leadership by being stronger, fiercer and more determined than the others. Their group of rude huts in the forest was not at all like a civilized town, from what they said of it, and they never seemed to give any attention to the gods or to worship. Perhaps they did not know much about such things. Even those who came from civilized places had wandered about so much that they seemed to think one place as good as another. They had no idea of the feeling that made their home, to the colonists, dearer than any other place ever could be. It was so not because it was pleasanter, or because they had more comforts than others, but because it was home, the place where people knew and trusted one another and trusted in the unseen dwellers by the fire to protect and guide them, and to make them wise and just in their dealings with one another.
To the colonists there was a very great difference between the ways of different people. The words they used showed it. Civil life began when men lived in a city, but this was not a large settlement of miscellaneous persons, but a permanent home of men who all worshiped the same gods, and obeyed the same laws and took responsibility. A man who did his part in the [pg 119]life of such a place was a “citizen,” and the life itself was “civilized,” the life of men who served one another and the whole community—men, women and children—looking out for its future as they would for the prosperity of their own family. In fact, such a body of people usually began with a group of relatives, as this one had. Without this dependence on one another to do the right thing, there could not be civilization.
A “company” was a group who were so far friends as to eat bread together. This in itself was a proof of a sort of friendship, for in eating a man had to lay down his weapons and be more or less off guard; when men ate together they were all off guard for the time. “Community” meant a group of families or persons bound together by kindred or friendship or common interest, and stronger for being bound together, as a bundle of sticks is stronger than separate sticks can be. “Religion” meant something stronger still, the binding together of people who felt the same sort of ties to the unseen world, who worshiped in the same way, and loved the same sweet, old, familiar prayers and chants, and believed in the same unseen rulers of life and death.
The various words for strangers outside these ties which bound them to their own people were [pg 120]just as expressive. Among farmers who lived on cleared land, within walls, the people who did not were “out of doors,” the forest people, the “foreigners.” Among a people who all spoke the same language, the thick-tongued country people, whose ideas were few, like their needs and their occupations, were the “barbarians,”—the babblers. And in a place like the settlement they were making now, a little island of orderly, intelligent life in a waste of almost uninhabited wilderness, the scattered hut dwellers were the “pagans,” the people of the waste. But almost every word that meant a civilized family or town had in it the idea of obligation. People must see that they could not be lawless and have any civil life at all. Civil life meant living together and living more or less by rules that were meant for the comfort and welfare of all.