The origin and development of the moral ideas

When from the savage and barbarous races of men we pass to peoples of a higher culture, as they first appear to us in the light of history, we meet among them social units similar in kind to those prevalent at lower stages of civilisation: the family, clan, village, tribe. We also find among them, side by side with the family consisting of parents and children, a larger family organisation, which, though not unknown among the lower races, assumes particular prominence in the archaic State.

In China the family generally remains undivided till the children of the younger sons are beginning to grow up. Then the younger branches of the family separate, and form their own households. But the new householders continue to take part in the ancestral worship of the old home; and mourning is worn in theory for four generations of ascendants and descendants in the direct line, and for contemporaries descended in the same fifth generation from the “honoured head” of the family.102 At the same time we find in China at least traces of a clan organisation. Large bodies of persons bear the same surname, and a penalty is inflicted on anyone who marries a person with the same surname as his own, whilst a man is strictly forbidden to nominate as his heir an individual of a different surname.103 Moreover, there are whole villages composed of relatives all bearing the same ancestral name. “In many cases,” says Mr. Doolittle, “for a long period of time no division of inherited property is made in rural districts, the descendants of a common ancestor living or working together, enjoying and sharing the profits of their labours under the general direction and supervision of the head of the clan and the heads of the family branches…. There may be only one head of the clan. Under him there are several heads of families.”104

The “four generations” of the Chinese, comprising those who are regarded as near relatives, have their counterpart in the family organisation of most so-called Aryan peoples. The Roman Propinqui—that is, parents and children, brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, nephews and nieces, first cousins (consobrini) and second cousins (sobrini)—exactly corresponded to the Anchisteis of the Greeks, the Sapindas of the Hindus,105 and the “Syngeneis” of the Persians.106 The persons belonging to these four generations stood in a particularly close relationship to each other. They had mutual rights and duties of various kinds. In early times, if one of them was killed, the survivors had to avenge his death. They were expected to assist each other whenever it was needed, especially before the court. They celebrated in common feasts of rejoicing and feasts for the dead. They had a common cult and common mourning. In short, they formed an enlarged family unit of which the individual families were merely sub-branches, even though they did not necessarily live in the same house.107 In India we still meet with a perishable survival of this organisation. “In the Joint Family of the Hindus,” says Sir Henry Maine, “… the agnatic group of the Romans absolutely survives—or rather, but for the English law and English courts, it would survive.

Here there is a real, thoroughly ascertained common ancestor, a genuine consanguinity, a common fund of property, a common dwelling.”108 The Gwentian, Dimetian, and Venedotian codes likewise represent the homestead and land of the free Welshman as a family holding. “So long as the head of the family lived,” says Mr. Seebohm, “all his descendants lived with him, apparently in the same homestead, unless new ones had already been built for them on the family land. In any case, they still formed part of the joint household of which he was the head. When a free tribesman, the head of a household, died, his holding was not broken up. It was held by his heirs for three generations as one joint holding.”109 So also among the subdivisions of ancient Irish society there was one which comprised the “near relatives,” the Propinqui of the Romans.110 Many of the South Slavonians to this day live in house communities each consisting of a body of from ten to sixty members or even more, who are blood-relations to the second or third degree on the male side, and who associate in a common dwelling or group of dwellings, having their land in common, following a common occupation, and being governed by a common chief.111 Among the Russians, too, there are households of this kind, containing the representatives of three generations; and previous to the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 such households were much more common than they are now.112 The ancient Teutons are the only “Aryan” race among whom the joint family organisation cannot be proved to have prevailed.113

Among all these peoples a number of kindred families or joint families were united into a larger social group forming a village community or a cluster of households. The Vedic people called such a body of kindred janmanā or simply grāma, which means “village”;114 and the same organisation still survives in India, though in a modified form. The type of Indian village communities which has been described by Sir Henry Maine is at once an assemblage of co-proprietors and an organised patriarchal society, providing for the management of the common fund and generally also for internal government, police, the administration of justice, and the apportionment of taxes and public duties. Unlike the joint family, the related families of the village community no longer hold their land as an indistinguishable common fund: they have portioned it out, at most they redistribute it periodically, and are thus on the high road to modern landed proprietorship. And whilst the joint family is a narrow circle of persons actually related to each other, the village community has very generally been adulterated by the admission of strangers, especially purchasers of shares, who have from time to time been engrafted on the original stock of blood-relatives. Yet in all such cases there is the assumption of an original common parentage; hence the Hindu village community of the type indicated, whenever it is not actually an association of kinsmen, is always a body of co-proprietors formed on the model of such an association.115

Corresponding to the Vedic grāma there were the Iranian viç, the Greek genos, and the Roman gens; and as among the Vedic people several grāmas formed a viç and several viçs a jana,116 so the Iranian viç, the Greek genos, and the Roman gens were, respectively, subdivisions of a zantu, phratria, and curia; and these again were subdivisions of a still more comprehensive unit, a daqyu, phyle, and tribus.117 The Roman territory was in earliest times divided into a number of clan-districts, each inhabited by a particular gens, which was thus a group associated at once by locality and by a common descent. Whilst each household had its own portion of land, the clan-household or village had a clan-land belonging to it, and this clan-land was managed up to a comparatively late period after the analogy of household-land, that is, on the system of joint-possession, each clan tilling its own land and thereafter distributing the produce among the several households belonging to it.

Even the traditions of Roman law furnish the information that wealth consisted at first in cattle and the usufruct of the soil, and that it was not till later that land came to be distributed among the burgesses as their own special property.118 Still in historical times, if a person left no sons or agnates living at his death, the inheritance escheated to the gentiles, or entire body of Roman citizens bearing the same name with the deceased, whereas no part of it was given to any relative united, however closely, with the dead man through female descent.119 But as the Hindu village community, so also the Roman gens, though originally a group of blood-relatives inhabiting a common district, was already in early times recruited from men of alien extraction who were assumed to be descended from a common ancestor. And it is difficult to believe that either in Rome or Greece even the fiction of a common origin could be preserved for long when the organisation of the people into gentes, phratries, and tribes was adopted by the State as a system of political division and their numbers were fixed.120 When the genos and gens first appear to us in history they were mere dwindling survivals, except in one respect: they remained, as they had been from the outset,121 religious communities long after they had lost all other practical importance. This was especially the case at Athens, where certain reputed gentes for centuries continued to play a prominent part in the religious cult;122 and the Romans seem to have preserved their gentilicia sacra still in Cicero’s time.123

In ancient Wales districts were occupied by tribes under their petty kings or chiefs, and the tribe (cenedl) was a bundle of kindreds “bound together and interlocked by common interests and frequent intermarriages, as well as by the necessity of mutual protection against foreign foes.”124 A group of households, again, corresponding to the Roman gens formed a trev, which was a cluster of scattered households, “not necessarily a village in the modern sense.”125 The same seems to have been the case with the Teutonic vici, spoken of by Tacitus;126 but that among the Teutons, also, the people of the same neighbourhood were blood-relatives may be directly inferred from a statement made by Cæsar.127 They were not much addicted to agriculture,128 and “the dreary world” they inhabited, with its desert aspect, its harsh climate, its lack of cultivation, was not favourable to the formation of permanent large social bodies of great cohesiveness. However, we meet among them social units which Cæsar calls regiones or pagi129 of which the vici may be assumed to have been subdivisions. Among the highly agricultural Slavonians, on the other hand, we find even in the present time a social organisation very similar to that of the Hindus. The South Slavonians, as we have seen, live in house communities corresponding to the joint families in India. Now, when the members of a house community, or zadruga—as it is often called—become too numerous, a separation takes place, and the emigrants form new households by themselves.

A zadruga is thus gradually expanded into a bratstvo, or brotherhood—a group of related house communities which not only feel themselves as branches of the same stock, but still have certain practical interests in common and a common chief. Several bratstva, finally, form a pleme, or tribe.130 Among the Russians, again, the family, or joint family, has developed into a mir, or village community, composed of an assemblage of separate houses each ruled by its own head, but with a common village chief elected by the heads of the various households. The Russian mir is an institution very similar to the Hindu village community described above. The land belongs to the community, and in earlier days it was probably cultivated in common. At present it is divided between the component families, the lots shifting among them periodically, or perhaps vesting in them as their property, but always subject to a power in the collective body of villagers to veto its sale. Originally the mir was also a group of kindred; but, as in the Hindu village community, the tie of blood has been greatly weakened by all sorts of fictions and the admission of so many strangers that the tradition of a common origin is dim or lost.131