Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 18.djvu/306

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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

does, that coöperation can at first be effective only where there is obedience to peremptory command, it follows that there must be not only an emotional nature which produces subordination, but also an intellectual nature which produces faith in a commander. That credulity which leads to awe of the capable man, as a possessor of supernatural power, and which afterward, causing dread of his ghost, prompts fulfillment of his remembered injunctions—that credulity which initiates the religious control of a deified chief, reënforcing the control of his divine descendant—is a credulity which can not be dispensed with during early stages of integration. Skepticism is fatal while the character, moral and intellectual, is such as to necessitate compulsory coöperation.

Political integration, then, hindered in many regions by environing conditions, has, in many races of mankind, been prevented from advancing far by unfitnesses of nature—physical, moral, and intellectual.

Besides certain fitnesses of nature in the united individuals, social union requires a considerable likeness of kind in their natures. At the outset the likeness of kind is insured by greater or less kinship in blood. Evidence of this meets us everywhere among the uncivilized. Of the Bushmen, Lichtenstein says: "Families alone form associations in single small hordes; sexual feelings, the instinctive love to children, or the customary attachment among relations, are the only ties that keep them in any sort of union." Again, "The Rock Veddahs are divided into small clans or families associated for relationship, who agree in partitioning the forest among themselves for hunting-grounds," etc. And this rise of the society out of the family, seen in these least organized groups, reappears in the considerably organized groups of more advanced savages. Instance the New-Zealanders, of whom we read that "eighteen historical nations occupy the country, each being subdivided into many tribes, originally families, as the prefix Ngati, signifying offspring (equivalent to O or Mac), obviously indicates." This connection between blood-relationship and social union is well shown by Humboldt's remarks concerning South American Indians. "Savages," he says, "know only their own family, and a tribe appears to them but a more numerous assemblage of relations." When Indians who inhabit the missions see those of the forest, who are unknown to them, they say: "They are, no doubt, my relations; I understand them when they speak to me." But these very savages detest all who are not of their family or their tribe; "they know the duties of family ties and of relationship, but not those of humanity."

When treating of the domestic relations, reasons were given for concluding that social stability increases as kinships become more definite and extended; since development of kinships, while insuring the likeness of nature which furthers coöperation, involves the strengthen-