power and spread their migrating bands over the most valuable areas to the gradual displacement of the ruder tribes. But in this respect they sig- nally failed. The means of sustaining life among the latter were remarka- bly persistent. The higher culture of the Village Indians, such as it was, did not enable them to advance, either in their weapons or in the art of war, beyond the more barbarous tribes, except as a superior house archi- tecture tended to render their villages and their habitations impregnable to Indian assault. Moreover, in the art of government they had not been able to rise above gentile institutions and establish political society. This fact demonstrates the impossibility of privileged classes and of potentates, under their institutions, with power to enforce the labor of the people for the erec- tion of palaces for their use, and explains the absence of such structures.
Horticulture and other domestic arts spread from the Village Indians to the tribes in the Lower Status of barbarism, and thus advanced them materially in their onward progress toward the higher condition of the Vil- lage Indians. Numerous tribes were thus raised out of savagery into bar- barism by appropriating the arts of life of tribes above them. This process has been a constant phenomenon in the history of the human race. It is well illustrated in America, where the Red Race, one in origin and possessed of homogeneous institutions, were in three different ethnical conditions or stages of culture.
There are certain usages and customs of the Indian tribes generally which tend to explain their plan of life — their large households, their houses, and their house architecture. They deserve a careful consideration and even further investigation beyond the bounds of our present knowledge. The influence of American civilization has very generally broken up their old plan of life, and introduced a new one more analogous to our own. It has been much the same in Spanish America. The old usages and cus- toms, in the particulars about to be stated, have now so far disappeared in their pure forms that their recovery is not free from difficulty. Those to be considered are the following :
I. The law of hospitality.
II. Communism in living.
III. The ownership of lands in common.
