instance the Damaras, who, as Galton says, "court slavery" and "follow a master as spaniels would." The like is alleged of other South Africans. One of them said to a gentleman known to me: "You're a pretty fellow to be a master; I've been with you two years and you've never beaten me once." Obviously the dispositions thus strongly contrasted are dispositions on which the impossibility or possibility of political integration largely depends. There must be added, as also influential, the presence or the absence of the nomadic instinct. Varieties of men, in whom wandering habits have been unchecked during countless generations of hunting life and pastoral life, show us that, even when forced into agricultural life, their tendency to move about greatly hinders aggregation. It is thus among the hill-tribes of India. "The Kookies are naturally a migratory race, never occupying the same place for more than two or, at the utmost, three years"; and the like holds of the Mishmees, who "never name their villages"—the existence of them being too transitory. In some races this migratory instinct survives and shows its effects, even after the formation of populous towns. Writing of the Bachassins in 1812, Burchell says that Litakun, containing 15,000 inhabitants, had been twice removed during a period of ten years. Clearly, people so little attached to the localities they were born in are not so easily united into large societies as people who love their early homes.
Concerning the intellectual traits which aid or impede the cohesion of men into masses, I may supplement what was said when delineating "The Primitive Man—Intellectual,"[1] by two corollaries of much significance. Social life, being coöperative life, presupposes not only an emotional nature fitted for coöperation, but also such. intelligence as perceives the benefits of coöperation, and can so regulate actions as to effect it. The unreflectiveness, the deficient consciousness of causation, and the utter lack of constructive imagination, shown by the uncivilized, hinder coöperation to a degree difficult to believe until proof is seen. Even the semi-civilized exhibit in quite simple matters an absence of concert which is astonishing.[2] Implying, as this inaptitude
- ↑ "Principles of Sociology," Part I, chapter vii.
- ↑ The behavior of Arab boatmen on the Nile displays this inability to coöperate in simple matters in a striking way. When jointly hauling at a rope, and beginning, as they do, to chant, the inference one draws is that they pull in time with their words. On observing, however, it turns out that their efforts are not combined at given intervals, but are put forth without any unity of rhythm. Similarly, when using their poles to push the dahabeiah off a sand-bank, the succession of grunts they severally make is so rapid that it is manifestly impossible for them to give those effectual combined pushes which imply appreciable intervals of preparation. Still more striking is the want of concert shown by the hundred or more Nubians and Arabs employed to drag the vessel up the rapids. There are shoutings, gesticulations, divided actions, utter confusion; so that only by accident does it at length happen that a sufficient number of efforts are put forth at the same moment. As was said to me by our Arab dragoman, a traveled man, "Ten Englishmen or Frenchmen would do the thing at once."
