It is well known how the invention of machinery in the middle of the eighteenth century brought about that industrial revolution, the social and political effects of which are still developing at this hour. Well, I venture to put it forward as a proposition which applies to human evolution, so far back as our evidence goes, that history is the history of great inventions. Of course, it is true that climate and geographical conditions in general help to determine the nature and quantity of the food-supply; so that, for instance, however much versed you may be in the art of agriculture, you cannot get corn to grow on the shores of the Arctic sea. But, given the needful inventions, superior weapons for instance, you need never allow yourselves to be shoved away into such an inhospitable region; to which you presumably do not retire voluntarily, unless, indeed, the state of your arts—for instance, your skill in hunting or taming the reindeer—inclines you to make a paradise of the tundra.
Suppose it granted, then, that a given people's arts and inventions, whether directly or indirectly productive, are capable of a certain average yield of food, it is certain, as Malthus and Darwin would remind us, that human fertility can be reckoned on to bring the numbers up to a limit bearing a more or less constant ratio to the means of subsistence.
At length we reach our more immediate subject—namely, social organization. In what sense, if any, is social organization dependent on numbers? Unfortunately, it is too large a question to thrash out here. I may, however, refer the reader to the ingenious classification of the peoples of the world, by reference to the degree of their social organization and culture, which is attempted by Mr. Sutherland in his Origin and Growth of the Moral Instinct. He there tries to show that a certain size of population can be correlated with each grade in the scale of human evolution—at any rate up to the point at which full-blown civilization is reached, when cases like that of Athens under Pericles, or Florence under the Medici, would probably cause him some trouble. For instance, he makes out that the lowest savages, Veddas, Pygmies, and so on, form groups of from ten to forty; whereas those who are but one degree less backward, such as the Australian natives, average from fifty to two hundred; whilst most of the North American tribes, who represent the next stage of general advance, run from a hundred up to five hundred. At this point he takes leave of the peoples he would class as "savage," their leading characteristic from the economic point of view being that they lead the more or less wandering life of hunters or of mere "gatherers." He then goes on to arrange similarly, in an ascending series of three divisions, the peoples that he terms "barbarian." Economically they are either sedentary, with a more or less developed agriculture, or, if nomad, pursue the pastoral mode of life. His lowest type of group, which includes the Iroquois, Maoris, and so forth, ranges from one thousand to five thousand; next come loosely organized states, such as Dahomey or Ashanti, where the numbers may reach one hundred thousand; whilst he makes barbarism culminate in more firmly compacted communities, such as are to be found, for example, in Abyssinia or Madagascar, the population of which he places at about half a million.
Now I am very sceptical about Mr. Sutherland's statistics, and regard his bold attempt to assign the world's peoples each to their own rung on the ladder of universal culture as, in the present state of our knowledge, no more than a clever hypothesis; which some keen anthropologist of the future might find it well worth his while to put thoroughly to the test. At a guess, however, I am disposed to accept his general principle that, on the whole and in the long run, during the earlier stages of human evolution, the complexity and coherence of the social order follow upon the size of the group; which, since its size, in turn, follows upon the mode of the economic life, may be described as the food-group.
Besides food, however, there is a second elemental condition which vitally affects the human race; and that is sex. Social organization thus comes to have a twofold aspect. On the one hand, and perhaps primarily, it is an organization of the food-quest. On the other hand, hardly less fundamentally, it is an organization of marriage. In what follows, the two aspects will be considered more or less together, as to a large extent they overlap. Primitive men, like other social animals, hang together naturally in the hunting pack, and no less naturally in the family; and at a very rudimentary stage of evolution there probably is very little distinction between the two. When, however, for some reason or other which anthropologists have still to discover, man takes to the institution of exogamy, the law of marrying-out, which forces men and women to unite who are members of more or less distinct food-groups, then, as we shall presently see, the matrimonial aspect of social organization tends to overshadow the politico-economic; if only because the latter can usually take care of itself, whereas to marry a perfect stranger is an embarrassing operation that might be expected to require a certain amount of arrangement on both sides.
To illustrate the pre-exogamic stage of human society is not so easy as it may seem; for, though it is possible to find examples, especially amongst Negritos such as the Andamanese or Bushmen, of peoples of the rudest culture, and living in very small communities, who apparently know neither exogamy nor what so often accompanies it, namely, totemism, we can never be certain whether we are dealing in such a case with the genuinely primitive, or merely with the degenerate. For instance, the chapter on the forms of social organization in Professor Hobhouse's Morals in Evolution starts off with an account of the system in vogue amongst the Veddas of the Ceylon jungle, his description being founded on the excellent observations of the brothers Sarasin. Now it is perfectly true that some of the Veddas appear to afford a perfect instance of what is sometimes called "the natural family." A tract of a few miles square forms the beat of a small group of families, four or five at most, which, for the most part, singly or in pairs, wander round hunting, fishing, gathering honey and digging up the wild yams; whilst they likewise take shelter together in shallow caves, where a roof, a piece of skin to lie on—though this is not essential—and, that most precious luxury of all, a fire, represent, apart from food, the sum total of their creature comforts.
Now, under these circumstances, it is not, perhaps, wonderful that the relationships within a group should be decidedly close. Indeed, the correct thing is for the children of a brother and sister to marry; though not, it would seem, for the children of two brothers or of two sisters. And yet there is no approach to promiscuity, but, on the contrary, a very strict monogamy, infidelities being as rare as they are deeply resented. That they had clans of some sort was, indeed, known to Professor Hobhouse and to the authorities whom he follows; but these clans are dismissed as having but the slightest organization and very few functions. An entirely new light, however, has been thrown on the meaning of this clan-system by the recent researches of Dr. and Mrs. Seligmann. It now turns out that some of the Veddas are exogamous—that is to say, are obliged by custom to marry outside their own clan—though others are not. The question then arises, Which, for the Veddas, is the older system, marrying-out or marrying-in? Seeing what a miserable remnant the Veddas are, I cannot but believe that we have here the case of a formerly exogamous people, groups of which have been forced to marry-in, simply because the alternative was not to marry at all. Of course, it is possible to argue that in so doing they merely reverted to what was once everywhere the primeval condition of man. But at this point historical science tails off into mere guesswork.
We reach relatively firm ground, on the other hand, when we pass on to consider the social organization of such exogamous and totemic peoples as the natives of Australia. The only trouble here is that the subject is too vast and complicated to permit of a handling at once summary and simple. Perhaps the most useful thing that can be done for the reader in a short space is to provide him with a few elementary distinctions, applying not only to the Australians, but more or less to totemic societies in general. With the help of these he may proceed to grapple for himself with the mass of highly interesting but bewildering details concerning social organization to be found in any of the leading first-hand authorities. For instance, for Australia he can do no better than consult the two fascinating works of Messrs. Spencer and Gillen on the Central tribes, or the no less illuminating volume of Howitt on the natives of the South-eastern region; whilst for North America there are many excellent monographs to choose from amongst those issued by the Bureau of Ethnology of the Smithsonian Institution. Or, if he is content to allow some one else to collect the material for him, his best plan will be to consult Dr. Frazer's monumental treatise, Totemism and Exogamy, which epitomizes the known facts for the whole wide world, as surveyed region by region.
The first thing to grasp is that, for peoples of this type, social organization is, primarily and on the face of it, identical with kinship-organization. Before proceeding further, let us see what kinship means. Distinguish kinship from consanguinity. Consanguinity is a physical fact. It depends on birth, and covers all one's real blood-relationships, whether recognized by society or not. Kinship, on the other hand, is a sociological fact. It depends on the conventional system of counting descent. Thus it may exclude real relationships; whilst, contrariwise, it may include such as are purely fictitious, as when some one is allowed by law to adopt a child as if it were his own. Now, under civilized conditions, though there is, as we have just seen, such an institution as adoption, whilst, again, there is the case of the illegitimate child, who can claim consanguinity, but can never, in English law at least, attain to kinship, yet, on the whole, we are hardly conscious of the difference between the genuine blood-tie and the social institution that is modelled more or less closely upon it. In primitive society, however, consanguinity tends to be wider than kinship by as much again. In other words, in the recognition of kinship one entire side of the family is usually left clean out of account. A man's kin comprises either his mother's people or his father's people, but not both. Remember that by the law of exogamy, the father and mother are strangers to each other. Hence, primitive society, as it were, issues a judgment of Solomon to the effect that, since they are not prepared to halve their child, it must belong body and soul either to one party or to the other.
We may now go on to analyse this one-sided type of kinship-organization a little more fully. There are three elementary principles that combine to produce it. They are exogamy, lineage and totemism. A word must be said about each in turn.