FAMILY COMMUNITIES SUCCEED
TO VILLAGE COMMUNITIES.
With the progress of what we are accustomed to call civilization, family sentiments and family ties axe weakened andexercise less influence over the actions of mankind. This fact is so general that we can see in it a law of social development.
Compare the constitution of the family among the Romans in time past, or among the rural classes of Russia, who have notyet emerged from the patriarchal period, with that which we meet with among the Anglo-Saxons of the United States, whohave pushed the modern principle of individuality to its extreme limits. Mark the contrast. In Russia and in Rome, alike, thefather of a family, or patriarch, exercises a despotic authority over those who are subject to him. He regulates the order oflabour, and apportions its fruits; he marries his sons and his daughters without regard to their inclination; he is the arbiter oftheir lot, and, one may say, their sovereign. In the United States, on the contrary, paternal authority is almost a nullity.
Young lads of fourteen or fifteen years of age choose their own career, and act in a manner completely independent. Younggirls are allowed to go out free from all restraint, to travel alone, to receive alone whom they like, and to select theirhusband without consulting any of their friends. The new generation disperses at an early day to the four corners of theworld. Thus the individual is developed in all his energy; but the family group plays no part socially: it has only to shelter thechildren until the moment, never very late in coming, when they take their flight. These domestic habits of the Americans areone of their most striking features to strangers.
In primitive societies all social order is centred in the family. The family has its worship, its particular gods, its laws, itstribunals, its government. It is the family which possesses the land. It is a true, perpetual corporation, which transmits itspatrimony from generation to generation. Every nation is composed of a union of independent families, feebly held togetherby a lax federal bond. Except in such groups of families the state has no existence.
Not only among the several races of Aryan origin, but among nearly all nations, the family in its origin presents the samecharacteristics. It is the in Greece, (1) the gens at Rome, the clan of the Celts, the cognatio (to borrow Caesar's word)of the Germans. As M. Fustel de Coulanges has very clearly shewn in his work La Cité Antique , (2) the Roman gens , whichplayed a great part so late as the first days of the republic, has descent from a common ancestor as its basis. The ancientRoman law considered members of the same gens mutually capable of inheriting. By the law of the XII. Tables, in default ofchildren and agnates, the gentilis is the natural heir. The gens had, accordingly, a kind of eminent domain over thepossessions of the family. Family communities are found among all nations with similar characteristics, alike among theIndians of North America, and the Irish Celts in the time of the Brehons or in the joint family of modern India. In Scotland,among the highlanders, the clan is regarded as a large family, all whose members are connected through an ancient commonancestor. In Wales they still count eighteen degrees of relationship. Cousinship among the Bretons is proverbial: and inLower Brittany it extends indefinitely, the fifteenth of August, when all the inhabitants of a parish assemble together, beingcalled the Feast of Cousins. Among any people, whose isolation has excluded it from the influence of modern ideas andmodem sentiments, we may still form an estimate of the power formerly possessed by the ancient organization of the family.
In remote times, when as yet the state with its essential attributes had no existence, individual man would have had no meansof subsistence or of self-defence if he lived in isolation. It was in the family that he found the protection and assistanceindispensable to him. The "oneness" of all the members of the family was, consequently, complete. The vendetta is notpeculiar to Corsica; it is found among all primitive nations, being the primordial form of justice. The family takes upon itselfto avenge wrongs of which one of its members has been the victim: and this is the only means of repression possible.
Without it crime would go unpunished, and the certain impunity would multiply misdeeds to such a degree as to put an endto social life. Among the Germans, it was the family which received or paid the Wehrgeld , or compensation for crime; andthere is exactly the same practice among the Albanians at the present day, and among all Indian tribes.
We have seen that everywhere, in India or Java as in Peru or Mexico, alike among the negroes of Africa and the Aryans ofEurope, the elementary social group was the village community, which was in possession of the land, and divided equallyamong all the families its temporary enjoyment. At a later period, when common ownership with periodical partition fell intodisuse, the soil did not immediately become the private property of individual owners, but it was held as the hereditary andinalienable patrimony of separate families, who lived in common under the same roof, or within the same inclosure. We haveno data to discover the exact moment of transition in the long economic evolution, by which enjoyment of the soil passedfrom the primitive form of community to that of quiritary dominium ; but even at the present day we may study the system asactually at work among the southern Slavs of Austria and Turkey. We possess circumstantial details regarding the system inthe middle ages, and, even after it disappeared, it left many traces in customs and laws. Thus there was generally aprohibition on the alienation of land without the consent of the family.
