Chapter 6

SOCIAL ORGANIZATION

If an explorer visits a savage tribe with intent to get at the true meaning of their life, his first duty, as every anthropologist will tell him, is to acquaint himself thoroughly with the social organization in all its forms. The reason for this is simply that only by studying the outsides of other people can we hope to arrive at what is going on inside them. "Institutions" will be found a convenient word to express all the externals of the life of man in society, so far as they reflect intelligence and purpose. Similarly, the internal or subjective states thereto corresponding may be collectively described as "beliefs." Thus, the field-worker's cardinal maxim can be phrased as follows: Work up to the beliefs by way of the institutions.

Further, there are two ways in which a given set of institutions can be investigated, and of these one, so far as it is practicable, should precede the other. First, the institutions should be examined as so many wheels in a social machine that is taken as if it were standing still. You simply note the characteristic make of each, and how it is placed in relation to the rest. Regarded in this static way, the institutions appear as "forms of social organization." Afterwards, the machine is supposed to be set going, and you contemplate the parts in movement. Regarded thus dynamically, the institutions appear as "customs."

In this chapter, then, something will be said about the forms of social organization prevailing amongst peoples of the lower culture. Our interest will be confined to the social morphology. In subsequent chapters we shall go on to what might be called, by way of contrast, the physiology of social life. In other words, we shall briefly consider the legal and religious customs, together with the associated beliefs.

How do the forms of social organization come into being? Does some one invent them? Does the very notion of organization imply an organizer? Or, like Topsy, do they simply grow? Are they natural crystallizations that take place when people are thrown together? For my own part, I think that, so long as we are pursuing anthropology and not philosophy--in other words, are piecing together events historically according as they appear to follow one another, and are not discussing the ultimate question of the relation of mind to matter, and which of the two in the long run governs which--we must be prepared to recognize both physical necessity and spiritual freedom as interpenetrating factors in human life. In the meantime, when considering the subject of social organization, we shall do well, I think, to keep asking ourselves all along, How far does force of circumstances, and how far does the force of intelligent purpose, account for such and such a net result?

If I were called upon to exhibit the chief determinants of human life as a single chain of causes and effects--a simplification of the historical problem, I may say at once, which I should never dream of putting forward except as a convenient fiction, a device for making research easier by providing it with a central line--I should do it thus. Working backwards, I should say that culture depends on social organization; social organization on numbers; numbers on food; and food on invention. Here both ends of the series are represented by spiritual factors--namely, culture at the one end, and invention at the other. Amongst the intermediate links, food and numbers may be reckoned as physical factors. Social organization, however, seems to face in both directions at once, and to be something half-way between a spiritual and a physical manifestation.

In placing invention at the bottom of the scale of conditions, I definitely break with the opinion that human evolution is throughout a purely "natural" process. Of course, you can use the word "natural" so widely and vaguely as to cover everything that was, or is, or could be. If it be used, however, so as to exclude the "artificial," then I am prepared to say that human life is preeminently an artificial construction, or, in other words, a work of art; the distinguishing mark of man consisting precisely in the fact that he alone of the animals is capable of art.

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.

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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.

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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.

Exogamy presents no difficulty until you try to account for its origin. It simply means marrying-out, in contrast to endogamy, or marrying-in. Suppose there were a village composed entirely of McIntyres and McIntoshes, and suppose that fashion compelled every McIntyre to marry a McIntosh, and every McIntosh a McIntyre, whilst to marry an outsider, say a McBean, was bad form for McIntyres and McIntoshes alike; then the two clans would be exogamous in respect to each other, whereas the village as a whole would be endogamous.

Lineage is the principle of reckoning descent along one or other of two lines--namely, the mother's line or the father's. The former method is termed matrilineal, the latter patrilineal. It sometimes, but by no means invariably, happens, when descent is counted matrilineally, that the wife stays with her people, and the husband has the status of a mere visitor and alien. In such a case the marriage is called matrilocal; otherwise it is patrilocal. Again, when the matrilocal type of marriage prevails, as likewise often when it does not, the wife and her people, rather than the father and his people, exercise supreme authority over the children. This is known as the matripotestal, as contrasted with the patripotestal, type of family. When the matrilineal, matrilocal and matripotestal conditions are found together, we have mother-right at its fullest and strongest. Where we get only two out of the three, or merely the first by itself, most authorities would still speak of mother-right; though it may be questioned how far the word mother-right, or the corresponding, now almost discarded, expression, "the matriarchate," can be safely used without further explanation, since it tends to imply a right (in the legal sense) and an authority, which in these circumstances is often no more than nominal.

Totemism, in the specific form that has to do with kinship, means that a social group depends for its identity on a certain intimate and exclusive relation in which it stands towards an animal-kind, or a plant-kind, or, more rarely, a class of inanimate objects, or, very rarely, something that is individual and not a kind or class at all. Such a totem, in the first place, normally provides the social group with its name. (The Boy Scouts, who call themselves Foxes, Peewits, and so on, according to their different patrols, have thus reverted to a very ancient usage.) In the second place, this name tends to be the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace that, somehow flowing from the totem to the totemites, sanctifies their communion. They are "all-one-flesh" with one another, as certain of the Australians phrase it, because they are "all-one-flesh" with the totem. Or, again, a man whose totem was _ngaui_, the sun, said that his name was _ngaui_ and he "was" _ngaui_; though he was equally ready to put it in another way, explaining that _ngaui_ "owned" him. If we wish to express the matter comprehensively, and at the same time to avoid language suggestive of a more advanced mysticism, we may perhaps describe the totem as, from this point of view, the totemite's "luck."

There is considerable variation, however, to be found in the practices and beliefs of a more or less religious kind that are associated with this form of totemism; though almost always there are some. Sometimes the totem is thought of as an ancestor, or as the common fund of life out of which the totemites are born and into which they go back when they die. Sometimes the totem is held to be a very present help in time of trouble, as when a kangaroo, by hopping along in a special way, warns the kangaroo-man of impending danger. Sometimes, on the other hand, the kangaroo-man thinks of himself mainly as the helper of the kangaroo, holding ceremonies in order that the kangaroos may wax fat and multiply. Again, almost invariably the totemite shows some respect towards his totem, refraining, for instance, from slaying and eating the totem-animal, unless it be in some specially solemn and sacramental way.

The upshot of these considerations is that if the totem is, on the face of it, a name, the savage answers the question, "What's in a name?" by finding in the name that makes him one with his brethren a wealth of mystic meaning, such as deepens for him the feeling of social solidarity to an extent that it takes a great effort on our part to appreciate.

Having separately examined the three principles of exogamy, lineage and totemism, we must now try to see how they work together. Generalization in regard to these matters is extremely risky, not to say rash; nevertheless, the following broad statements may serve the reader as working hypotheses, that he can go on to test for himself by looking into the facts. Firstly, exogamy and totemism, whether they be in origin distinct or not, tend in practice to go pretty closely together. Secondly, lineage, or the one-sided system of reckoning descent, is more or less independent of the other two principles.[4]

[Footnote 4: That is to say, either mother-right or father-right in any of their forms may exist in conjunction with exogamy and totemism. It is certainly not the fact that, wherever totemism is in a state of vigour, mother-right is regularly found. At most it may be urged in favour of the priority of mother-right that, if there is change, it is invariably from mother-right to father-right, and never the other way about.]

If, instead of consulting the evidence that is to hand about the savage world as it exists to-day, you read some book crammed full with theories about social origins, you probably come away with the impression that totemic society is entirely an affair of clans. Some such notion as the following is precipitated in your mind. You figure to yourself two small food-groups, whose respective beats are, let us say, on each side of a river. For some unknown reason they are totemic, one group calling itself Cockatoo, the other calling itself Crow, whilst each feels in consequence that its members are "all-one-flesh" in some mysterious and moving sense. Again, for some unknown reason each is exogamous, so that matrimonial alliances are bound to take place across the river. Lastly, each has mother-right of the full-blown kind. The Cockatoo-girls and the Crow-girls abide each on their own side of the river, where they are visited by partners from across the water; who, whether they tend to stay and make themselves useful, or are merely intermittent in their attentions, remain outsiders from the totemic point of view and are treated as such. The children, meanwhile, grow up in the Cockatoo and Crow quarters respectively as little Cockatoos or Crows. If they need to be chastised, a Cockatoo hand, not necessarily the mother's, but perhaps her brother's--never the father's, however--administers the slap. When they grow up, they take their chances for better and worse with the mother's people; fighting when they fight, though it be against the father's people; sharing in the toils and the spoils of the chase; inheriting the weapons and any other property that is handed on from one generation to another; and, last but not least, taking part in the totemic mysteries that disclose to the elect the inner meaning of being a Cockatoo or a Crow, as the case may be.

Now such a picture of the original clan and of the original inter-clan organization is very pretty and easy to keep in one's head. And when one is simply guessing about the first beginnings of things, there is something to be said for starting from some highly abstract and simple concept, which is afterwards elaborated by additions and qualifications until the developed notion comes near to matching the complexity of the real facts. Such speculations, then, are quite permissible and even necessary in their place. To do justice, however, to the facts about totemic society, as known to us by actual observation, it remains to note that the clan is by no means the only form of social organization that it displays.

The clan, it is true, whether matrilineal or patrilineal, tends at the totemic level of society to eclipse the family. The natural family, of course--that is to say, the more or less permanent association of father, mother and children, is always there in some shape and to some extent. But, so long as the one-sided method of counting descent prevails, and is reinforced by totemism, the family cannot attain to the dignity of a formally recognized institution. On the other hand, the totemic clan, of all the formally recognized groupings of society to which an individual belongs in virtue of his birth and kinship, is, so to speak, the most specific. As the Australian puts it, it makes him what he "is." His social essence is to be a Cockatoo or a Crow. Consequently his first duty is towards his clan and its members, human and not-human. Wherever there are clans, and so long as there is any totemism worthy of the name, this would seem to be the general law.

Besides the specific unity, however, provided by the clan, there are wider, and, as it were, more generic unities into which a man is born, in totemic society of the complex type that is found in the actual world of to-day.

First, he belongs to a phratry. In Australia the tribe--a term to be defined presently--is nearly always split up into two exogamous divisions, which it is usual to call phratries.[5] Then, in some of the Australian tribes, the phratry is subdivided into two, and, in others, into four portions, between which exogamy takes place according to a curious criss-cross scheme. These exogamous subdivisions, which are peculiar to Australia, are known as matrimonial classes. Dr. Frazer thinks that they are the result of deliberate arrangement on the part of native statesmen; and certainly he is right in his contention that there is an artificial and man-made look about them. The system of phratries, on the other hand, whether it carves up the tribe into two, or, as sometimes in North America and elsewhere, into more than two primary divisions, under which the clans tend to group themselves in a more or less orderly way, has all the appearance of a natural development out of the clan-system. Thus, to revert to the imaginary case of the Cockatoos and Crows practising exogamy across the river, it seems easy to understand how the numbers on both sides might increase until, whilst remaining Cockatoos and Crows for cross-river purposes, they would find it necessary to adopt among themselves subordinate distinctions; such as would be sure to model themselves on the old Cockatoo-Crow principle of separate totemic badges. But we must not wander off into questions of origin. It is enough for our present purpose to have noted the fact that, within the tribe, there are normally other forms of social grouping into which a man is born, as well as the clan.

[Footnote 5: From a Greek word meaning "brotherhood," which was applied to a very similar institution.]

Now we come to the tribe. This may be described as the political unit. Its constitution tends to be lax and its functions vague. One way of seizing its nature is to think of it as the social union within which exogamy takes place. The intermarrying groups naturally hang together, and are thus in their entirety endogamous, in the sense that marriage with pure outsiders is disallowed by custom. Moreover, by mingling in this way, they are likely to attain to the use of a common dialect, and a common name, speaking of themselves, for instance, as "the men," and lumping the rest of humanity together as "foreigners." To act together, however, as, for instance, in war, in order to repel incursions on the part of the said foreigners, is not easy without some definite organization. In Australia, where there is very little war, this organization is mostly wanting. In North America, on the other hand, amongst the more advanced and warlike tribes, we find regular tribal officers, and some approach to a political constitution. Yet in Australia there is at least one occasion when a sort of tribal gathering takes place--namely, when their elaborate ceremonies for the initiation of the youths is being held.

It would seem, however, that these ceremonies are, as often as not, intertribal rather than tribal. So similar are the customs and beliefs over wide areas, that groups with apparently little or nothing else in common will assemble together, and take part in proceedings that are something like a Pan-Anglican Congress and a World's Fair rolled into one. To this indefinite type of intertribal association the term "nation" is sometimes applied. Only when there is definite organization, as never in Australia, and only occasionally in North America, as amongst the Iroquois, can we venture to describe it as a genuine "confederacy."

No doubt the reader's head is already in a whirl, though I have perpetrated endless sins of omission and, I doubt not, of commission as well, in order to simplify the glorious confusion of the subject of the social organization prevailing in what is conveniently but loosely lumped together as totemic society. Thus, I have omitted to mention that sometimes the totems seem to have nothing to do at all with the social organization; as, for example, amongst the famous Arunta of central Australia, whom Messrs. Spencer and Gillen have so carefully described. I have, again, refrained from pointing out that sometimes there are exogamous divisions--some would call them moieties to distinguish them from phratries--which have no clans grouped under them, and, on the other hand, have themselves little or no resemblance to totemic clans. These, and ever so many other exceptional cases, I have simply passed by.

An even more serious kind of omission is the following. I have throughout identified the social organization with the kinship organization--namely, that into which a man is born in consequence of the marriage laws and the system of reckoning descent. But there are other secondary features of what can only be classed as social organization, which have nothing to do with kinship. Sex, for instance, has a direct bearing on social status. The men and the women often form markedly distinct groups; so that we are almost reminded of the way in which the male and the female linnets go about in separate flocks as soon as the pairing season is over. Of course, disparity of occupation has something to do with it. But, for the native mind, the difference evidently goes far deeper than that. In some parts of Australia there are actually sex-totems, signifying that each sex is all-one-flesh, a mystic corporation. And, all the savage world over, there is a feeling that woman is uncanny, a thing apart, which feeling is probably responsible for most of the special disabilities--and the special privileges--that are the lot of woman at the present day.

Again, age likewise has considerable influence on social status. It is not merely a case of being graded as a youth until once for all you legally "come of age," and are enrolled, amongst the men. The grading of ages is frequently most elaborate, and each batch mounts the social ladder step by step. Just as, at the university, each year has apportioned to it by public opinion the things it may do and the things it may not do, whilst, later on, the bachelor, the master, and the doctor stand each a degree higher in respect of academic rank; so in darkest Australia, from youth up to middle age at least, a man will normally undergo a progressive initiation into the secrets of life, accompanied by a steady widening in the sphere of his social duties and rights.

Lastly, locality affects status, and increasingly as the wandering life gives way to stable occupation. Amongst a few hundred people who are never out of touch with each other, the forms of natal association hold their own against any that local association is likely to suggest in their place. According to natal grouping, therefore, in the broad sense that includes sex and age no less than kinship, the members of the tribe camp, fight, perform magical ceremonies, play games, are initiated, are married, and are buried. But let the tribe increase in numbers, and spread through a considerable area, over the face of which communications are difficult and proportionately rare. Instantly the local group tends to become all in all. Authority and initiative must always rest with the men on the spot; and the old natal combinations, weakened by inevitable absenteeism, at last cease to represent the true framework of the social order. They tend to linger on, of course, in the shape of subordinate institutions. For instance, the totemic groups cease to have direct connection with the marriage system, and, on the strength of the ceremonies associated with them, develop into what are known as secret societies. Or, again, the clan is gradually overshadowed by the family, so that kinship, with its rights and duties, becomes practically limited to the nearer blood-relations; who, moreover, begin to be treated for practical purposes as kinsmen, even when they are on the side of the family which lineage does not officially recognize. Thus the forms of natal association no longer constitute the backbone of the body politic. Their public importance has gone. Henceforward, the social unit is the local group. The territorial principle comes more and more to determine affinities and functions. Kinship has dethroned itself by its very success. Thanks to the organizing power of kinship, primitive society has grown, and by growing has stretched the birth-tie until it snaps. Some relationships become distant in a local and territorial sense, and thereupon they cease to count. My duty towards my kin passes into my duty towards my neighbour.

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Reasons of space make it impossible to survey the further developments to which social organization is subject under the sway of locality. It is, perhaps, less essential to insist on them here, because, whereas totemic society is a thing which we civilized folk have the very greatest difficulty in understanding, we all have direct insight into the meaning of a territorial arrangement; since, from the village community up to the modern state, the same fundamental type of social structure obtains throughout.

Besides local contiguity, however, there is a second principle which greatly helps to shape the social order, as soon as society is sufficiently advanced in its arts and industries to have taken firm root, so to speak, on the earth's surface. This is the principle of private property, and especially of private property in land. The most fundamental of class distinctions is that between rich and poor. That between free and slave, in communities that have slavery, is not at first sight strictly parallel, since there may be a class of poor freemen intermediate between the nobles and the slaves; but it is obvious that in this case, too, private property is really responsible for the mode of grading. Or sometimes social position may seem to depend primarily on industrial occupation, the Indian caste-system providing an instance in point. Since, however, the most honourable occupations in the long run coincide with those that pay best, we come back once again to private property as the ultimate source of social rank, under an economic system of the more developed kind.

In this brief sketch it has been impossible to do more than hint how social organization is relative to numbers, which in their turn are relative to the skill with which the food-quest is carried on. But if, up to a certain point, it be true that the structure of society depends on its mass in a more or less physical way, there is to be borne in mind another aspect of the matter, which also has been hinted at as we went rapidly along. A good deal of intelligence has throughout helped towards the establishing of the social order. If social organization is in part a natural result of the expansion of the population, it is partly also, in the best sense of the word, an artificial creation of the human mind, which has exerted itself to devise modes of grouping whereby men might be enabled to work together in larger and ever larger wholes.

Regarded, however, in the purely external way which a study of its mere structure involves, society appears as a machine--that is to say, appears as the work of intelligence indeed, but not as itself instinct with intelligence. In what follows we shall set the social machine moving. We shall then have a better chance of obtaining an inner view of the driving power. We shall find that we have to abandon the notion that society is a machine. It is more, even, than an organism. It is a communion of souls--souls that, as so many independent, yet interdependent, manifestations of the life-force, are pressing forward in the search for individuality and freedom.