Jump to content

Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 18.djvu/130

From Wikisource
This page has been validated.
120
THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

each, giving the lower, middle, and upper status of savagery, and the lower, middle, and upper status of barbarism; these subdivisions also being established on the development of specified arts.

Two grand plans of government are also set forth—tribal and national; tribal government being personal, i. e., taking into account persons only, and national government being territorial and based on property.

In the second part he discussed in a thorough manner the different forms of government in the order of their evolution, beginning with the organization of society upon the basis of sex, as it is found in Australia, and fragments of which are found as survivals among other tribes of the world. He then expounded the organization of society and tribal governments based upon kinship; and having by wide research discovered this system in every quarter of the globe among people living in barbaric life, and having discovered by abundant evidence that the same form of society and government existed in the early history of the most civilized peoples, he logically inferred that gentile society and tribal government as based upon kinship are the universal characteristic of man in his passage through the period of barbarism. He also discussed the evolution of gentile society from connubial society; defined the organic units of tribal government as gentes, phratries, tribes, and confederacies, pointing out their origin and growth as illustrated by abundant examples throughout the globe; and, finally, the evolution of gentile society and tribal government into property society and national government.

In Part III he treats of the evolution of the family—discovers five successive forms, and sets forth the processes by which the first or consanguineal family, which is founded upon the intermarriage of brothers and sisters, own and collateral in a group, was developed into the last or monogamian, which is founded upon marriage by single pairs with exclusive cohabitation. In the final chapter of this part he gives the sequence of institutions connected with the family in tabular form with appended explanations.

In the fourth part Mr. Morgan deals with the origin of civilization. Discovery and invention finally led to the accumulation of property, and society was organized on this basis; and for the protection of property and the industries by which it is produced civilized governments have finally been established over territorial areas. The growth of the idea of property with the development of industries is explained, together with the evolution of laws of inheritance.

Thus the plan of Mr. Morgan's great work was completed. In it was laid the foundation for the science of government as it is finally to be erected by the philosophy of evolution.

In the progress of human culture institutions are developed; new rights with their correlative duties arise from the new relations into which men are placed. For the maintenance of these rights and the