JC 
 
 11 
 
 J42 
 
 f^DWARD JENKS, M.A.
 
 LIBRARY ' 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF 
 CALirORNIA 
 
 SAN DIEGO
 
 
 < \ r.
 
 
 ^^?:- 

 
 NEW YORti 
 
 E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 
 
 681 FiftK Avenue 
 
 l^gggjyUgiglBOHafill
 
 Copyright, 1900 
 By the MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 Set up and electrotyped April, 1900 
 
 Reprinted September, 1902 
 
 January, 1907, January, 1909 
 
 July, 1918
 
 PREFACE 
 
 Some ten years ago Sir Frederick Pollock published a 
 valuable and interesting little book on the history of politi- 
 cal speculation.* But the author is not aware that any one 
 has yet attempted to summarize in a brief, popular form, 
 the record of political action. It has occurred, therefore, 
 to the promoters of this Series that such a summary might 
 prove interesting, if only by way of comparison. 
 
 These pages profess to give, then, a brief account of 
 what men have done, not of what they have thought, in 
 that important branch of human activity which we call Poli- 
 tics, or the Art of Government. But if it should be ob- 
 jected that what men do is really always the outcome, 
 more or less perfect, of what they think, the answer is, that 
 we recognize, for practical purposes, a distinction between 
 what the world, in theory at least, believes to be best, and 
 that which it actually succeeds in achieving. And a com- 
 parison of the two objects can hardly fail to be instructive. 
 
 To the other, and inevitable objection, that it is impos- 
 sible, within the narrow limits of a popular sketch, to deal 
 with such a subject as the History of Politics, the author 
 
 * "An Introduction to the History of the Science of Politics." By 
 (Sir) Frederick Pollock. London, 1890. A new edition has recently 
 been published. 
 
 (v)
 
 Vi PREFACE 
 
 will reply with the doctrine which, paradoxical as it may 
 sound, is yet maintained by very able writers, that the 
 greater the subject the smaller the space in which it can be 
 treated. Readers who care to see parts of the subject 
 worked out in greater detail may be referred to the 
 author's "Law and Politics in the Middle Ages" (Murray, 
 1898). 
 
 Oxford, January, 1900.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 INTRODUCTORY 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. Types of Society i 
 
 TYPE I— SAVAGE SOCIETY 
 
 II. Savage Organization 6 
 
 TYPE II — PATRIARCHAL SOCIETY 
 
 III. Patriarchal Society in General i6 
 
 IV. The Domestication of Animals 23 
 
 V. Tribal Organization 32 
 
 VI. Agriculture and the Clan 44 
 
 VII. Industry and the Gild 62 
 
 TYPE III — MODERN (POLITICAL) SOCIETY 
 
 VIII. The State and Feudalism 73 
 
 IX. Early Political Institutions 84 
 
 X. The State and Property 97 
 
 XI. The State and Justice 112 
 
 (vii)
 
 vfii CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 XII. The State and Legislation 124 
 
 XIII. The State and Administration 140 
 
 XIV. Varieties of Political Society 151 
 
 List of Authorities 165 
 
 Index 167 
 
 Glossary 173
 
 A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 INCTRODUCTO RY 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 Types of Society 
 
 Politics. — By Politics we mean the business of Govern- 
 ment: that is to say, the control and management of people 
 living together in a society. A socie^, again, is a group or 
 mass of people, bound together by a certain common priu' 
 ciple or object. A mere chance crowd is not a society ; it 
 has no definite object, it collects and disperses at the whim 
 of the moment, its members recognize no duties toward one 
 another. It has no history, no organization. 
 
 Society. — Societies are of many kinds. They may exist 
 for purposes of religion, commercial profit, amusement, 
 education, or a host of other objects. A good specimen of 
 a religious society is, of course, an ordinary church congre- 
 gation, or a missionary society ; of a commercial society, 
 an ordinary trading company ; of an amusement society, a 
 West-end club ; of an educational society, an university or 
 a college. And the management and organization of any 
 such society may in strictness be considered a branch of 
 Politics. But it is convenient to reserve the term politics 
 for matters concerning one particular and very important 
 class of societies, those communities, namely, which are not 
 formed for any special or limited objects, but which have 
 
 (I)
 
 2 A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 grown up, almost spontaneously, as part of the general his- 
 tory of mankind, and which are concerned with its general 
 interests. Men, as a rule, live in these communities, not 
 because they choose to do so, but because they are bom 
 into them ; and until quite recently, they were not allowed 
 to change them at their pleasure. In their most advanced 
 forms, we call these communities States ; Great Britain, 
 France, Holland, Germany, Spain, Russia, etc. , are undoubt- 
 edly States. And these States are the proper subject matter 
 of Politics, in the modern sense of the term. But, as we 
 study their history, we become aware that these communi- 
 ties have gradually developed out of societies of quite 
 another type, organized on different principles. 
 
 ModePM social groups. — Now-a-days, the principle 
 which binds together these communities of the modern 
 type is the tie of military allegiance. In the States which 
 practice conscription, or universal military service, this is 
 very obvious. The most heinous political offence which 
 a Frenchman or a German can commit is attempting to 
 evade military service ; or, possibly worse, taking part in 
 military service against his own country. But even in Great 
 Britain, where conscription is not practised, the tie is really 
 the same. It is unquestionable that the Queen, through her 
 Ministers, has the right, in case of necessity, to call upon 
 everyone of her male subjects to render personal military 
 service ; and any British subject captured fighting against 
 his country would be liable to suffer death as a traitor. In 
 the older conditions of society, however, to which allusion 
 has been made, the tie was not that of military allegiance, 
 but kinship, which was at first, no doubt, based on actual 
 blood relationship, but was afterwards extended by fictitious 
 methods. To men living in such a community, the inclusion 
 of strangers in blood would have appeared a monstrosity. 
 The mere facts that these strangers were settled in the same 
 neighbourhood, or carried on trade with the community in 
 question, or even were willing to fi?ht its battles, would
 
 TYPES OF SOCIETY 3 
 
 have seemed to such a community no arguments at all for 
 admitting them to membership. The most conspicuous 
 example in the world of a community organized on such 
 principles is, of course, the Jews, who, in spite of their world- 
 wide dispersal, still maintain intact their tribal organization, 
 at least in theory. The same ideas were at the bottom of 
 the famous struggle in early Roman history between the 
 patricians * and the plebeians; and it is possible that some- 
 thing of the same kind may be unconsciously at the root of 
 the trouble between the Boers and the Uitlanders in the 
 Transvaal. The Welsh and the Irish before the Norman 
 Conquest, the Scottish Highlanders two or three centuries 
 ago, undoubtedly lived in communites of this type, which 
 we may call patriarchal, or tribal. 
 
 Still older groups. — Until quite recently it was be- 
 lieved that this patriarchal type was the oldest type of 
 human community. Speculators on the history of society 
 started from the patriarchal household, and worked down- 
 wards to the modem State. But the brilliant discoveries of 
 the last half century have revealed to us a still more primi- 
 tive type of society which, so far as the writer knows, has 
 never been described in a popular book, and which it takes 
 some considerable effort to realize, even when it is stated in 
 the simplest language. It is intensely interesting, both as 
 adding another whole province to the domain of scientific 
 history, and as revealing another step in the path by which 
 man has moved onward and upward. At present too little 
 is known of its details to warrant more than a brief descrip- 
 tion ; but, thanks to the labours of devoted students, who 
 have faced discomfort and hardship in order to examine 
 this type of society in its few surviving examples, the out- 
 lines are now fairly clear. Unfortunately, it is hard to find a 
 good name by which it may be distinguished. Its scientific 
 name of Totemistic is too elaborate and technical for popu- 
 
 * A " patrician " is one who has a " pater," or chief of kindred.
 
 4 A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 lar use. Perliaps it will be best to call it the savage type ; 
 though it must be clearly understood that the term implies 
 neither contempt nor Jslame. It merely signifies that the 
 type in question is \ (try primitive or rudimentary. 
 
 Here, then, we have our three historical types of human 
 society — the savage, the patriarchal, and the military (or 
 "political" in the modern sense). And it will be the 
 business of " A Short History of Politics " to describe each of 
 them in turn, beginning with the oldest, and, if possible, to 
 point out the causes which led societies to abandon the 
 older for the newer types. To do this, we shall not require 
 to describe the histories of particular societies ; that will be 
 the task of other writers in the Series. But we shall en- 
 deavour to trace a normal course for the development of 
 societies, a course which every community tends to follow, 
 unless deflected from its natural path by special circum- 
 stances. It is the fashion to scoff at such attempts, and, 
 doubtless, there is a danger in "general views." But there 
 is, likewise, a danger in specialization; and a man who uses 
 the microscope only loses the treasures revealed by the 
 telescope. It is a wase ideal of study: to know something 
 of everything, and everything of something. 
 
 OUP plan. — But, if we start on a story of this kind, it is 
 quite evident that we must have something in the nature of a 
 plan. To plunge recklessly into the facts of universal his- 
 tory would be to invite failure. To what pathway shall we 
 trust to bring us safely out of the forest ? 
 
 Institutions. — There is a large part of the history of 
 every community which seems to leave no permanent traces 
 upon it. No doubt the results are there ; but they are too 
 vague and too subtle to be easily described. On the other 
 hand, the effects of other parts of the community's history 
 are plainly discernible in the permanent and visible results 
 which they leave on the community itself. These results we 
 call institutions : i. e., the machinery by which the business 
 of the community is carried on. Perhaps it would be better
 
 TYPES OF SOCIETY 5 
 
 to call them limbs or orgatts of the community, for they 
 resemble natural growths far more than artificial creations. 
 They correspond in the body social with the litnbs or organs 
 of the body natural: i. e., with those instruments by which 
 the business of the body — its absorption, digestion, de- 
 fence, attack, etc., are carried on. And so we use the meta- 
 phor organization, to describe the development of institu- 
 tions in the body social, or community. 
 
 Theip relative importance. — These institutions may 
 not really be the most important part of the body social, any 
 more than the limbs and organs are the most important 
 part of the body natural. The really important thing in 
 each is that indefinable existence which we call life. But as 
 no one has yet succeeded in explaining what life is, even in 
 the natural body, still less in the social body, we shall be 
 wiser to describe the institutions of society, to show, if we 
 can, how they appeared, grew, and gradually changed, till 
 they assumed the shape in which we know them now. Only, 
 as every fully developed society has many kinds of institu- 
 tions, political, industrial, religious, educational, and so on, 
 with all of which it would be impossible to deal, we must 
 remember that this is a book on politics, and deals only, or 
 chiefly, with those institutions which are concerned directly 
 with the business of government. 
 
 This, then, will be the plan of our work : to describe, as 
 briefly and clearly as possible, the origin and development 
 of the institutions of government.
 
 Type I — Savage Society 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 Savage Organization 
 
 Savagres. — in spite of the constantly increasing inter- 
 course between the most remote parts of the world, and the 
 civilizing influences of commerce, there remain quite a con- 
 siderable number of peoples who still live under primitive 
 or savage conditions. Among them may be reckoned the 
 Andamanese of the Bay of Bengal, the hill tribes of Madras, 
 the Juangs of Orissa, the Veddahs of Ceylon, the Bushmen 
 and Akkas of Africa, the Colorado Indians of North 
 America, the Caribs of the centre and the Brazilians of 
 the south, the Dyaks of Borneo, and the Eskimos of Green- 
 land and Labrador. The Tasmanians of Van Diemen's 
 Land were, until their recent extinction, perfect specimens 
 of unadulterated savagery. But by far the most important 
 examples, because the most remote from admixture and the 
 most scientifically and recently studied, are the aborigines* 
 of Australia, who, in the centre and north of that vast con- 
 tinent, still roam untouched and unreclaimed. Their num- 
 bers are considerable, and, though they are probably des- 
 tined to disappear at no distant date, they are at present in 
 full possession of their primitive organization, Owing to 
 the praiseworthy efforts of a generation of students, promi- 
 
 *The reader is cautioned that the term "Australian Native" is by 
 local custom reserved for the descendants of the white colonists, and is 
 rarely extended to the " blackfellow." 
 
 (6)
 
 SAVAGE ORGANIZATION 7 
 
 nent among them being Mr. A. W. Howitt, the Rev. Lorimer 
 Fison, Professor Baldwin Spencer and Mr. Gillen, who have 
 braved the hardships of the AustraHan desert, and won their 
 way into the confidence of the savages by consistent kind- 
 ness, we are now able to form some tolerably correct ideas 
 of savage life. Their accounts may be profitably supplemented 
 by the studies of the late Mr. Lewis Morgan, who, in the Red 
 Indians of America, found a people just emerging from sav- 
 agery into the patriarchal stage of society, and whose book 
 on "Ancient Society " will ultimately be recognized as one 
 of the great scientific products of the nineteenth century. 
 
 Savagre life. — The material side of Australian existence 
 may be best described in a series of negatives. The savages 
 understand neither the cultivation of the land nor the rearing 
 of sheep and cattle, 'nrerr only domestic animal (if " domes- 
 tic " it can be called) is the dog. They have no idea of dwel- 
 lings more advanced than a rude bough hut ; for the most part 
 they take shelter in caves, and behind pieces of bark propped 
 up against trees or rocks. They have no food but the scanty 
 game of the "bush " or forest, such as the wallaby and the 
 opossum, and the natural products of the earth. The art of 
 fire-making, in a very primitive form, is known to them ; but 
 their notions of cooking are of the crudest. Still less have 
 they the knowledge of working in metals, either by hammer- 
 ing or by melting. The recently adopted iron tomahawk is 
 an article of barter, obtained from the enterprising traveller, 
 in exchange for natural products. The indigenous weapons 
 are the flint-headed spear and axe, and the wooden boom- 
 erang or throwing-stick. Australian legends go back to a 
 time when even the use of stone knives was unknown, and 
 operations, even on the human body, were performed with a 
 charred stick. The "pitchi," or bark-basket, and the dig- 
 ging-stick of the women appear to be almost the only articles 
 which can be classed as "tools." The clothing of the 
 Australians may be described as purely ornamental. It 
 consists, in fact, of certain decorations used in religious
 
 8 A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 ceremonies ; in ordinary' life they are stark naked. The 
 appalHng feature of this miserable existence, always border- 
 ing on starvation, is that it seems to have gone on during 
 countless ages. The fauna and flora of Australia are, it is 
 well known, of a thoroughly archaic type ; the naturalist 
 discovers in its forests and rivers forms which have long 
 since been extinct in other parts of the world. And as there 
 is no evidence whatever of any intercourse between Australia 
 and other lands during the period of recorded history, as, in 
 fact, Australia was, until three centuries ago, an unknown 
 land, we can only suppose that the Australian has led his 
 present life during thousands of years. His isolation has 
 been, no doubt, 'the chief cause of his stagnation. 
 
 Savage institutions. — This view is entirely confirmed 
 by a study of the non-material side of Australian life. Crude 
 and primitive as it seems to us, its elaborateness of detail 
 and complexity of ceremonial point to a history of great, but 
 unrecorded, antiquity. When we consider the terror which 
 all novelty has for the savage, especially in religious matters, 
 we are bound to think that the elaborate ceremonies described 
 in Messrs. Spencer's and Gillen's valuable book * must have 
 taken centuries, perhaps even thousands of years, to work 
 out. We may be very sure that no sudden change was made ; 
 but that only little by little was the elaborate ceremonial in- 
 troduced. We cannot here do more than describe its leading 
 features. 
 
 "Tribe" op "pack." — It is the custom to speak of 
 the Australians and other savages as living in "tribes." 
 But the term is most misleading; for the word "tribe" 
 always suggests to us the notion of descent from a common 
 ancestor, or, at any rate, of close blood relationship. Now 
 there is, as we shall see, a most important stage in human 
 progress, in which descent from a common ancestor plays a 
 vital part in social organization. But the Australian "tribe " 
 
 ♦"The Native Tribes of Central Australia." London, 1899.
 
 SAVAGE ORGANIZATION 9 
 
 does not really play a very important part in savage life, at 
 least on its social side. It appears to be mainly a group of 
 people engaged in hunting together, a cooperative or com- 
 munal society for the acquisition of food supply. It would 
 really be better to call it the "pack;" for it far more 
 resembles a hunting than a social organization. All its 
 members are entitled to a share in the proceeds of the day's 
 chase, and, quite naturally, they camp and live together. 
 But they are not sharply divided, for other purposes, from 
 other "packs" living in the neighbourhood. On the con- 
 trary, they frequently mingle with them ; and a social free- 
 masonry extends over vast areas of the continent. 
 
 Totem group.— The real social unit of the Australians 
 is not the "tribe," but the totem group. The word ^"^ totem'''' 
 is not, of course, Australian ;* but it is generally accepted as 
 the name of an institution which is found almost universally 
 among savages. The totem group is, primarily, a body of 
 persons, distinguished by the sign of some natural object, 
 such as an animal or tree, who may not intermarry with one 
 another. In many cases, membership of the totem group 
 is settled by certain rules of inheritance, generally through 
 females. But among the Australians, new-born or (in some 
 cases) unborn infants are allotted by the wise men to partic- 
 ular totems ; and this arrangement has all the appearance of 
 extreme antiquity, for the savage has no idea of principles ; 
 he requires hard and fast rules. 
 
 No mappiage within the totem.— The Australian may 
 not marry within his totem. "Snake may not marry snake. 
 Emu may not marry emu. ' ' That is the first rule of savage 
 social organization. Of its origin we have no knowledge ; 
 but there can be little doubt that its object was to prevent 
 the marriage of near relations. Though the savage cannot 
 argue on principles, he is capable of observing facts. And 
 
 *It sems to have been first used, in a slightly different form, by the 
 Ojibway Indians of North America.
 
 lO A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 the evils of close inbreeding must, one would think, have 
 ultimately forced themselves upon his notice If so, we can 
 understand the rule, "Snake may not marry snake." But 
 this is conjecture. 
 
 Marriage with another totem.— The other side of 
 the rule is equally startling. The savage may not marry 
 within his totem, but he must marry into another totem 
 specially fixed for him. More than this, he not only marries 
 into the specified totem, but he marries the whole of the 
 women of that totem in his own generation. Thus, all the 
 men of the Snake totem are husbands of all the women of 
 the Emu totem in the same generation ; and, as a natural 
 consequence, all the women of Snake totem are wives of all 
 the men of Emu totem. Of course, it must not be supposed, 
 that this condition of marital community really exists in prac- 
 tice. As a matter of fact, each Australian contents himself 
 with one or two women from his marriage totem. But it is a 
 fact that an Australian would see nothing wrong in a man 
 living as the husband of any woman of his marriage totem, 
 provided she were of his own generation. And if an Au- 
 stralian is travelling from "tribe" to "tribe," he will, as a 
 matter of course, find a wife waiting for him in every "tribe " 
 which contains women of his marriage totem. It is facts such 
 as these which scandalized early missionaries, and often 
 caused them to shut their eyes to what was really a most 
 valuable object lesson in social history. 
 
 No unmarried people. — It will be obvious that, under 
 these arrangements, there are no bachelors or spinsters 
 among the Australian savages ; but that, as Mr. Fison has 
 well observed, marriage is, among them, "a natural state 
 into which both parties are bom." 
 
 Different generations. — It has been hinted before 
 that some classification is necessary to distinguish the different 
 degrees or generations within the totem group ; and this is 
 one of the objects of the mysterious corroborees, or cere- 
 monial gatherings, which play so large a part in the life of
 
 SAVAGE ORGANIZATION II 
 
 the savage. Though it is extremely difficult, owing to the 
 unwillingness of savages to reveal the secrets of their rites, 
 to ascertain precisely the details of these ceremonies, it is 
 fairly clear that they serve more than one object. In the 
 first place, as was frankly admitted by an Australian mystery 
 man of repute, they effect the useful result of impressing the 
 ordinary members of the totem group with a sense of the 
 importance and power of the ' ' Birraark ' ' or sorcerers, 
 usually old men, who conduct them. In the second, they 
 undoubtedly seem to keep alive the legendary history of the 
 totem group, and thus to bind its members closer together. 
 The songs and dances of the ceremonies in many cases are 
 supposed to represent great events which have occurred in 
 the " Alcheringa," or distant past. Finally, at the cere- 
 monies, often lasting for several days, the youths and 
 maidens who have attained to maturity are initiated into 
 some of the mysteries of the totem, often to the accompani- 
 ment of painful rites, such as circumcision and other lacera- 
 tion. It is possible that, on such occasions, the initiated 
 are subjected to tattooing, with a view of establishing their 
 identity, and of allotting them to a certain totem, and to a 
 certain generation within that totem. 
 
 System of relationship. — By this, or some other 
 artificial means, the curiously simple system of Australian 
 relationship is constructed. All the women of his marriage 
 totem in his generation are a man's wives ; all their children 
 are his children ; all the members of his totem in the same 
 generation are his brothers and sisters (whom he may not 
 marry) ; all the members of his mother's totem are his parents 
 (for descent is nearly always reckoned through females). 
 Parent, child, brother and sister are thus the only relation- 
 ships recognized. Rudimentary as this system appears to be, 
 it is widely spread throughout the Malay archipelago, and Mr. 
 Fison tells an amusing story of a missionary who, to increase 
 his familiarity with his native converts, was made by the pro- 
 cess of adoption the brother of his man-servant. Happening
 
 12 A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 to meet the man's wife, the missionary pleasantly explained 
 that he was now her brother. Whereupon the lady instantly 
 corrected him by saying, ' ' Oh no, you are not my brother, 
 you are my husband." Mr. Morgan, indeed, who has studied 
 the natives of Hawaii and Honolulu, as well as his own Red 
 Indians, thinks that there are traces of still older systems, in 
 which marriage between brothers and sisters, and even 
 between lineal relations, was practised. Be this as it may, 
 the Australian system prevails widely among savages, and 
 even, with certain modifications, among some highly civilized 
 people, e. g., the Chinese. 
 
 Totem questions. — Whether the totem serves any 
 other purpose than that of prohibiting intermarriage of near 
 relations, and what is the precise connection which the 
 sav^ages believe to exist between themselves and their totems, 
 are much disputed questions. With regard to the latter, it 
 has been suggested by recent observers that the Australian 
 believes himself to be, in some mysterious way, the offspring 
 of his totem. There can also be little doubt that, in some 
 cases at least, the totem is an object of worship, a fetich 
 which will deal destruction if the rule of the intermarriage is 
 not rigidly observed. And, if this be so, we get an interest- 
 ing glimpse at the rudiments of two of the most powerful 
 factors in human progress — Religion and Law. It has been 
 said that the progress of religious ideas follows three stages. 
 In the first, Man worships some object entirely external to 
 himself, a stone or an animal. In the second, he worships a 
 human being like himself, usually one of his own ancestors. 
 In the third, he has risen to the idea of a God who is both 
 divine and human, unlike and distinct from himself, and yet 
 like to and connected with himself. The Australian totem 
 would answer to the first of these three stages. But it is 
 somewhat significant to notice that the savage's view of his 
 deity is usually that of a malevolent Power, dealing disease 
 and death, and thirsting for human blood. It is to be feared 
 that this view is largely the reflection of the savage's only
 
 SAVAGE ORGANIZATION 13 
 
 means of reasoning ; viz. , by experience. He sees that any 
 one of his fellows who happens to be exceptionally strong 
 and clever is apt to show his power by the exercise of 
 crueltj'. He transfers this character to his god. 
 
 Savage Law. — Closely connected with this view is the 
 savage's rudimentary notion of Law. With him it is a 
 purely negative idea, a list of things which are prohibited, or 
 taboo. The origin of these prohibitions is often ludicrous, 
 but they are generally found to be connected with the appre- 
 hension of danger. A man is walking along a path, and is 
 struck by a falling branch. Instead of attributing the blow 
 to natural causes, he assumes it to be the result of the anger 
 of the Tree-Spirit, offended by his action in using the path. 
 In the future, that path is taboo, or forbidden. A rude log 
 bridge is made over a stream. It gives way beneath a 
 passenger, and the man is drowned. That (the savage 
 thinks) is the vengeance of the Water-Spirit, incensed at the 
 insult ofifered by the existence of the bridge, which deprives 
 him of his due number of victims. But the convenience of 
 the bridge is so great that men are tempted to build it again. 
 And then a cunning man suggests that, if a victim be 
 sacrificed before the bridge is used, the Water-Spirit will 
 be satisfied. And so some poor wretch is bound hand and 
 foot and thrown into the torrent. Probably the bridge is 
 better built this time, and does not break. The charm has 
 worked. In such a way arises the notion of sacrifice, whicn 
 has played such a ghastly part in history. Jacob Grimm, 
 the great German scholar, found the practice of bridge 
 sacrifices in use in northeastern Germany, happily only in a 
 mock form, as late as the beginning of the present century. 
 The practice of bur>'ing alive a victim in the foundations of 
 a house, as a sacrifice to the Earth-Spirit, whose domain is 
 being invaded, is widely spread in savage countries. Doubt- 
 less it had a similar origin. 
 
 Whether the totem bond also serves the purpose of unit- 
 ing its members together for offence and defence, is also a
 
 14 A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 disputed question. There are traces of such a state of 
 things, and its existence would certainly explain the develop- 
 ment of a conspicuous feature of the second or patriarchal 
 stage of society, the blood-feud group. But the relations of 
 one group of savages to another are obscure and uncertain. 
 Doubtless the members of a group, whether it be the 
 "tribe" or hunting unit, or the totemistic marriage group, 
 do not recognize any duties towards strangers. But their 
 actual attitude is probably determined by the state of the 
 food supply and the amount of elbow-room. If game is 
 abundant, and hunting-grounds large in proportion to the 
 population, distinct groups of savages may exist side by side 
 in a given area without conflict. But if game is scarce, and 
 the land thickly peopled (in the savage state the two things 
 would probably go together), wars and murders are, prob- 
 ably, frequent. Even the revolting practice of cannibalism 
 probably originated in hunger ; though there are some races 
 which seem unable to abandon it, even in times of plenty, 
 and plausible reasons are invented for its continuance. But 
 it is one of the surest laws of progress that, with each for- 
 ward step, the same area is able to maintain an ever- 
 increasing number of people. And so the temptations for 
 war, or at least the excuses for war, are happily ever 
 diminishing. 
 
 Summary. — It is a somewhat dark picture that we have 
 had to draw of the life of primitive man. And indeed the 
 noble savage, who passed his days in a sort of perpetual 
 picnic, surrounded by his family, who sported in the flowery 
 meads while he discoursed sweet music, was a last century 
 fiction which did more credit to the hearts than to the heads 
 of an unhistorical generation. The actual savage is usually 
 a miserable, underfed and undersized creature, naked and 
 shivering, houseless, in constant terror of dangers seen and 
 unseen, with no family ties as we understand them, with no 
 certain food supply, and no settled abode. And yet even 
 the savage life contributes something to the total of civiliza-
 
 SAVAGE ORGANIZATION 15 
 
 tion. The savage hunter, dependent for his very existence 
 on success in the chase, learns to endure hardships without 
 murmuring, in the pursuit of his prey. Constantly on the 
 lookout for danger, he develops powers of observation 
 which are the admiration of his more civilized brother. He 
 can trace the footsteps of an enemy in a thicket where a 
 modern detective would declare it impossible to read any 
 sign. He can foretell the approach of a storm from warn- 
 ings which would escape a scientific weather prophet. He 
 can hear sounds which to a civilized man are simply 
 inaudible. He has infinite patience, provided only that the 
 prospect of reward is palpable and immediate. These are 
 no mean contributions to the store of civilization.
 
 Type II — Patriarchal Society 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 Patriarchal Society in General 
 
 Distinguishing features. — We now approach the 
 consideration of the second stage of social development, 
 in which the binding ties are more distinctly marked, and 
 the organization more perfect, than in the preceding stage. 
 All patriarchal society is characterized by certain well- 
 marked features, which distinguish it from earlier as well as 
 from later types of society. These features are : 
 
 1. Male kinship. — We saw that, in the savage type of 
 community, while something that might be called kinship 
 prevailed, it was so arbitrary and artificial that it might be 
 regarded as a superstition rather than a fact. So far as there 
 was any recognition of blood relationship at all, it was rela- 
 tionship through women, not through men. But, in the 
 patriarchal stage, paternity is the leading fact. Men are 
 counted of kin because they are descended from the same 
 male ancestor. Sometimes, no doubt, the relationship is 
 fictitious rather than real ; as when deficiencies in a family 
 are made up by adoption or fosterage. But the very exist- 
 ence of such devices shows the importance attached to 
 descent through males. Leaving for the present the ques- 
 tion of how this important change came about, we notice 
 another feature of patriarchal society closely connected 
 with it. 
 
 2. Pepmanent mappiage.— Without such an addition, 
 
 Cl6)
 
 PATRIARCHAL SOCIETY IN GENERAL 17 
 
 the first feature could hardly develop. In a state of society 
 such as that of the Australians {ante, p. 10), no one could 
 be certain who his father was. It is not until a woman 
 becomes the wife of one man only that anything like cer- 
 tainty of fatherhood appears. But it must not be assumed 
 that marriage, as we understand it, i. e., permanent union of 
 one man with one woman, is a feature of all patriarchal 
 society. On the other hand, polyg'a-my, 1. e., the marriage 
 of one man to several women, is very characteristic of 
 patriarchal society in its earlier stages. Only in its later 
 developments does it approach to the modern system of 
 marriage. But the existence of polygamy is no bar to the 
 recognition of kinship through males ; on the contrary, it 
 renders it increasingly certain, by providing against a 
 superfluity of unmarried women. Finally, a third essential 
 feature of patriarchal society must be mentioned. 
 
 3. Paternal authority. — The principles upon which 
 patriarchal society is conducted require, as we shall see, the 
 existence of groups presided over and controlled by the 
 well-nigh despotic authority of a male ancestor. This 
 ancestor controls not only the business affairs of the group, 
 but its religion and its conduct. He alone is responsible for 
 it to the larger group of which it forms a part. The pre- 
 cise limits of this authority differ in different stages. In 
 early Rome, as is well known, the patria potcstas extended 
 to all the descendants of a living ancestor, no matter how 
 old they were, and even survived, in a modified form, over 
 the female descendants after his death. Moreover, it com- 
 prised even the power of life and death, to say nothing of 
 control and chastisement. In later forms of the patriarchal 
 system this power becomes greatly modified, but an inter- 
 esting record of Welsh society at the end of the patriarchal 
 stage says of the Mab, or youth under fourteen : (He is) 
 "at his father's platter, and his father lord over him, and he 
 is to receive no punishment but that of his father, and he is 
 not to possess a penny of his property during that time,
 
 l8 A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 only in common with his father." In fact, for legal pur- 
 poses, he has no sej^arate existence. 
 
 Actual examples. — These are the universal features of 
 society in the patriarchal stage, whether we look at it among 
 Jewish tribes, or the early Greeks (e. g., the Homeric 
 heroes) or Romans, or among the Arabs of the desert, or 
 the Hindus and Mohammedans of northern India, or the 
 Afghans of the frontier, or, better still, among our Teutonic 
 forefathers in their German homes, or, perhaps best of all, 
 among the branches of the Keltic race, the Welsh, the Irish 
 and the Highland Scotch, with whom it lingered until a 
 comparatively late period. 
 
 Two stages of patpiarehal society. — But the study 
 of patriarchal society has, until quite lately, been rendered 
 very difficult by the practice, adopted by writers and 
 speakers, of treating all patriarchal society as though it 
 were of one kind. As a consequence, the picture has been 
 confused, inconsistencies and difficulties have arisen, and 
 impatient critics have been tempted to regard the patriarchal 
 stage of society as an ingenious fiction. 
 
 Tribal. — As a matter of fact, a patient study of the 
 evidence soon reveals the truth that patriarchal society falls 
 into two subordinate stages, represented by two different 
 groups or social units. The first of these may properly be 
 called the tribe, the second the cla7i (or sept). The former 
 (the tribe) is a large group, consisting of several hundred 
 individuals, the fully qualified among whom certainly believe 
 themselves to be descended from a common male ancestor, 
 and are certainly bound together by the ties of kinship 
 through males. But, in most cases, if not all, the common 
 ancestor of the tribe is a fictitious person, invented to 
 satisfy the etiquette which has now come to regard descent 
 from a common male ancestor as the only true basis of 
 society ; and, as a matter of fact, the lawfully bom children 
 of all male members of the tribe are entitled to be classed as 
 tribesmen.
 
 PATRIARCHAL SOCIETY IN GENERAL 19 
 
 Clannish. — The clan, on the other hand, is a much 
 smaller body, consisting of some three or four generations 
 only, in descent from a perfectly well-known male ancestor, 
 and breaking up, automatically, into new clans or septs 
 when the proper limits have been reached. 
 
 Mistaken (oldeP) theory. — This distinction has been 
 perceived by many writers, who, however, have failed to 
 understand its true significance, and, consequently, its value 
 as a help to the study of patriarchal society. They have 
 been misled by the old theory, now definitely exploded, that 
 the beginnings of society are to be found in the single house- 
 hold, or group of descendants of a living man. When such 
 a house-father died, they say, his sons would set up house- 
 holds of similar pattern for themselves, and these house- 
 holds, remembering their relationship, would form a clan; 
 when the clan grew so big that its actual relationships became 
 obscure, it would become a tribe. To the Scottish his- 
 torian, Mr. W. F. Skene, may be attributed the merit of 
 having shown, by actual demonstration, that this account 
 really reverses the historical order of things. The tribe, or 
 larger unit, is the oldest ; as it breaks up, clans are formed ; 
 and the break up of the clan system leaves as independent 
 units the households formerly comprised within it. Finally, 
 but not till long after patriarchal society has passed away, 
 the household is dissolved, and the individual becomes the 
 unit of society. 
 
 Supported by evidence of savage society.— This 
 view, put forward by Mr. Skene in his " Celtic Scotland " 
 (vol. iii), has been strengthened, in the most remarkable way, 
 by the discoveries concerning the nature of savage society 
 described in the preceding chapter. By these discoveries it 
 has been proved that the earliest social group, so far from 
 being a small household of a single man and his wives, is a 
 large and loosely connected group or "pack," organized for 
 matrimonial purposes on a very artificial plan, which alto- 
 gether precludes the existence of the "single family." If it
 
 20 A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 were necessar>', it could easily be shown that the origin of 
 society in "single families" is inherently impossible; but it 
 is sufficient to point out that the evidence is against it. 
 
 Origin of the distinction. — Although, however, the 
 author acknowledges his debt to Mr. Skene for the estab- 
 lishment of the true relationship between the tribe and the 
 clan, he is not aware that the causes of the appearance of 
 either have been stated anywhere in brief form. He thinks 
 it better, therefore, even at the risk of anticipating matters a 
 little, to state clearly his own view, which is this : thai the 
 domestication of animals converted the savage pack into the 
 patriarchal tribe ; and that the adoption of agriculture broke 
 up the tribe into clans. 
 
 Distinguishing marks of patpiapchal society.— 
 If this view be correct, obviously the first thing to do in 
 attempting the story of patriarchal society is to consider the 
 domestication of animals and its immediate results. But, as 
 this will require a chapter to itself, it will be well once more 
 to emphasize the distinction between patriarchal society, and 
 modern or political society, in the strict sense, in order that 
 the reader may realize that he is going to deal with ideas 
 completely foreign to his own. Patriarchal society, then, 
 is distinguished from modem society by four leading 
 qualities. 
 
 Personal union. — i. It is personal, not territorial. 
 Although, as has been said, the basis of modern society is 
 military allegiance, the great factor which determines that 
 allegiance is residence in a fixed area. Doubtless, for cer- 
 tain purposes, a citizen of State A may reside in the terri- 
 tory of State B ; yet he is looked upon as an alien, and he 
 takes no part in the political life of State B. On the other 
 hand, if a man qualifies as a citizen of a State by residence, 
 we ask no questions about his blood or race. "Everyone 
 born in France is a Frenchman," says the Code Napoleon ; 
 and, broadly speaking, that is the rule in civilized countries 
 at the present day. But patriarchal society cares nothing for
 
 PATRIARCHAL SOCIETY IN GENERAL 21 
 
 residence or locality. To be a member of a particular 
 group, a man must be of the blood of that group. If he is 
 not, he may pass his whole life in its service, but he will not 
 be a member. In fact, the whole group itself may move its 
 quarters at any time without affecting its constitution in 
 any way. At least, this is so in the earlier stages of patri- 
 archal society. 
 
 Exclusiveness. — 2. It is exclusive. Modem society 
 believes in large numbers. In spite of certain grumblings 
 about " immigrant aliens," modern States are really anxious 
 to increase their numbers as much as possible, because they 
 know that an increase of numbers means an increase of 
 wealth and of fighting-power. To a community in the 
 patriarchal stage, an Immigration Bureau would appear to 
 be a monstrosity. To its members the immigrant is simply 
 a thief, who comes to stint the pasture and the corn land ; a 
 heathen, who will introduce strange customs and worships. 
 If he is admitted, he is admitted only as a serf or slave. 
 
 Communal eharaetep. — 3. It is ccmtmunal. In a 
 modern State, the supreme authority deals directly with 
 each individual. Of course there are intermediate authori- 
 ties, but they act only as subordinates or delegates of the 
 supreme power, which can set them aside. But, in patri- 
 archal society, each man is a member of a small group, 
 which is itself a member of a larger group, and so on. And 
 each man is responsible only to the head of his immediate 
 gi'oup — the son, wife or slave to the housefather, the house- 
 father to the head of his clan, the head of the clan to the 
 tribal chief. The practical results of this principle are 
 vitally important, as we shall see later on. 
 
 No competition. — 4. It is non-competitive. We are 
 accustomed to a state of society in which each man works 
 at what he thinks best, and in the way he thinks best. Sub- 
 ject to certain laws, mostly of a police character, each man 
 "does as he likes." If a farmer thinks he can get a better 
 crop by sowing earher than his neighbours, he does so. If
 
 22 A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 a carpenter thinks he can make a better box by using nails 
 where screws have hitherto been employed, he does so. If 
 a draper thinks he can attract customers by selling tea, he 
 does so. But patriarchal society would have looked on such 
 practices with horror. Its life was regulated by fixed custom, 
 to deviate from which was impiety. How this idea arose, 
 and how it gradually disappeared, we must inquire hereafter. 
 At present we must simply bear it in mind in thinking of 
 patriarchal society. In patriarchal society, everj'one found 
 his duties in life prescribed for him ; and not only his duties, 
 but the way in which he should perform them. Any devia- 
 tion from customary rules was looked upon with disfavour. 
 
 We now come to deal with the great discovery which 
 made patriarchal society possible and inevitable.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 The Domestication of Animals 
 
 The art of taming wild animals and making them serve 
 the purposes of man is one of the great discoveries of the 
 world. Just as it is quite certain that there are some races, 
 e. g., the Australians, who have never acquired it, so it is 
 equally certain that many other races have learnt it, with 
 results of the greatest importance: But as to the man or 
 men who introduced it, we have no knowledge, except 
 through vague and obviously untrustworthy tradition. Like 
 many of the greatest benefactors of the human race, they 
 remain anonymous. In all probability, the discovery was 
 made independently by many different races, under combi- 
 nations of favourable circumstances. 
 
 Origin of domestication. — But, if we cannot speak 
 with confidence of names and dates in the matter, we can 
 make certain tolerably shrewd guesses as to the way in 
 which domestication of animals came about. We start with 
 the fact that the most valuable of the world's domestic 
 animals, the sheep, horse, ox, goat, etc., are known to 
 exist, or to have existed, in a wild state. It is practically 
 impossible to suppose that these wild animals are (except in 
 rare cases) the result of the escape from captivity of tame 
 animals. It follows, therefore, that the start which a pack of 
 savages could obtain in the matter of domestication would 
 depend upon the character of the wild animals in its neigh- 
 bourhood. For it is fairly obvious by this time that many 
 wild animals are not suitable for taming. Thus, it is hardly 
 
 (23)
 
 24 A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 possible that tlie lion, tiger or bear will ever really become 
 domestic animals, in spite of the fact that their strength and 
 endurance would prove valuable qualities if they could be 
 used. And so some peoples may have remained utterly 
 savage, because of the fact that their country does not pro- 
 duce animals capable of domestication. Again, some races, 
 like the Eskimos, appear to have had only the wild ancestors 
 of the dog and the reindeer, and thus to have been very 
 limited in their opportunities. Other races have been able 
 to tame the sheep, one of the most valuable aids to civiliza- 
 tion ; others, again, have had the still more valuable ox. 
 
 Superfluity of game.— But still the question remains 
 — How was the process of domestication discovered ? Here, 
 again, we can only proceed by speculation ; but a most valu- 
 able account of his experiences in Southern Africa (Damara 
 Land), published by the late Sir Francis Galton in the 
 middle of the century, affords us most suggestive hints.* 
 
 Two of the most striking features of the savage character 
 are recklessness and greed. Being quite unable to make pro- 
 vision for the future, or even to realize the wants of the 
 future, the savage consumes in disgusting orgies the produce 
 of a successful hunt. A stroke of luck, such as the capture 
 of a big herd of game, simply means an opportunity for 
 gorging. But even the savage capacity for food has its 
 limits ; and, in exceptionally good seasons, there is a super- 
 fluity of game. A civilized man would strain every nerve 
 to store the surplus away against future wants. The savage 
 simply wastes it ; partly because he knows that meat will not 
 keep, partly because he cannot realize the needs of the future. 
 The "pemmican" or sun-dried meat of the Red Indian, 
 and his "caches," or buried hoards, are the limits of the 
 savage capacity for storing up against a rainy day. 
 
 Pets. — But, if the savage is reckless and greedy, he is 
 often affectionate and playful. If he has had as much food 
 
 ' Narrative of an Explorer in Tropical South Africa." London, 1853
 
 THE DOMESTICATION OF ANIMALS 25 
 
 as he can eat, he will amuse himself by playing with his 
 captives, instead of killing them. At first, no doubt, there 
 is a good deal of the cat and the mouse in the relationship ; 
 but, in time, the savage comes positively to love his captives, 
 and even to resist the pangs of hunger rather than kill them. 
 In other words, the earliest domestic animals were pets ; pre- 
 served, not with a view of profit) but for sport or amuse- 
 ment. And it is most important to observe that animals so 
 selected would naturally be the handsomest and finest of the 
 catch, whose appearance would delight the eye. The history 
 of the process is neatly summed up in the two meanings of 
 the English verb "to Hke." In the primitive sense, "to 
 like" means "to like to eat ; " later on, it means "to like 
 to keep," or have by one. "I like mutton," or, "I like 
 my dog."* 
 
 Food supply. — But, of course, feelings of affection 
 would be bound to give way in the long run to feelings of 
 hunger. And then the tame animals would be slaughtered 
 for food. And so it would ultimately dawn on the savage 
 that the keeping of pets was really a profitable business, 
 because it afforded some protection against /amine. Gradu- 
 ally it would become more and more common. Finally, the 
 savage would learn by experience that, even without destroy- 
 ing them, his pets could be put to valuable use. Thus the 
 wool of sheep, the hair of goats, the milk of cows, would 
 be to a savage like a gift from an unknown Power. Still 
 more, the young of his captives would add to his delight in 
 his possessions ; and his forest lore, his keen observation of 
 the habits of animals in their wild condition, would come in 
 most usefully for his new occupation as a breeder and keeper 
 of flocks and herds. But, when he had got thus far, the 
 savage would have ceased to be a savage ; he would have 
 become a pastoralist. 
 
 *It has been suggested that the reverence of the savage for his 
 totem may also have had something to do with the preservation o{ 
 animals.
 
 26 A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 Results of change. — We must now notice the chief 
 effects upon social arrangements produced by the adoption 
 of pastoral pursuits. 
 
 Kinship through males.— In the first place, it is not 
 very difficult to see how it would lead to the establishment of 
 kinship through males. In the savage, or hunting stage, the 
 hunting was chiefly done by the men ; the women, though 
 in many cases they took part in the chase, being employed 
 chiefly in carrying weapons, setting traps, and other sub- 
 ordinate offices. Their real tasks were to mind camp, dress 
 the food, and, what has always and inevitably been woman's 
 work, to look after the children. Quite naturally, though 
 not, perhaps, very justly, the superfluous animals which were 
 left over after the hunger of the camp had been satisfied, 
 were looked upon as connected in some special way with the 
 man who had captured them. And he, therefore, would 
 have the training and management of them ; and, in course 
 of time, they would come to be looked upon as his property. 
 In speculations as to the origin of the important institution of 
 property, it is often said that capture is the first title to 
 ownership. This is hardly true ; for accounts of savage so- 
 cieties generally show that the captured animals, so far as 
 they are required for food, are treated as the common stock 
 of the camp. But, when the claims of hunger have been 
 satisfied, the actual captors are allowed to retain the re- 
 mainder as pets ; and, as they become fonder and fonder of 
 them, they resent more and more any interference with them 
 by other people. It is just what happens with children, who 
 are, in many respects, very like savages. What a child 
 thinks of is not, hoiu the toys came there, but who uses them. 
 "I always play with this doll, so it is mine." That is the 
 feeling of the savage for his ox or sheep. 
 
 Pastoral pupsuits.— And then, as all the advantages of 
 the rearing of animals come to be realized, the savage 
 "pack" gradually changes into a society of shepherds or 
 herdsmen, in which the men are engaged in tending cattle,
 
 THE DOMESTICATION OF ANIMALS 27 
 
 sheep, or goats, while to the women fall the subordinate 
 offices of spinning the wool, milking the cows and goats, and 
 making the butter and cheese. The men drive the flocks to 
 pasture and water, regulate the breeding, guard the folds 
 against enemies, decide which of the animals shall be killed 
 for food, and break in the beasts of burden. 
 
 Value of labour.— But in these tasks it gradually be- 
 comes apparent to the men that labour is a valuable thing. 
 A man who has been very successful in cattle-rearing re- 
 quires a number of "hands" to keep his herds in order. 
 Besides the domestic labour performed by women, he 
 requires the outdoor labour of men, to prevent the cattle 
 from straying or being stolen, to drive them to pasture in the 
 morning and bring them back at night. To this demand for 
 labour we probably owe two of the great institutions of the 
 pastoral age : permanent marriage and slavery. There is 
 really, as we shall see, nothing out of place in taking these 
 two together, odd as the connection may sound to 
 modem ears. 
 
 Permanent maPFiage has been alluded to before as 
 one of the essential features of patriarchal society. By 
 superficial writers its appearance is often attributed to some 
 vague improvement in morality or taste. Unhappily, the 
 facts point to a much less exalted origin ; viz., the desire of 
 the man to secure for himself exclusively the labour of the 
 woman and her offspring. If the change had come about 
 from exalted ideas of morality, we should probably have 
 found two features in the new system — (i) equality of num- 
 bers between the man and the woman ; (2) free consent to 
 the marriage on both sides. It is notorious that just the op- 
 posite are the facts of the patriarchal system, at any rate at 
 its earlier stages. Polygamy, or plurality of wives, is the 
 rule ; and, while the husband is not at all particular about 
 the conduct of his wife with other men, he is intensely strict 
 about appropriating the whole of her labour ; and all her 
 offspring, no matter who is the real father, belong to him.
 
 a8 A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 Again, the ancient forms of marriage ; viz., marriage by 
 capture and marriage by purchase, point irresistibly to the 
 conclusion that the woman had little or no voice in the 
 matter. In the case of marriage by capture, the husband 
 carried oflf his wife by force from a neighbouring tribe ; and, 
 long after the reality of this practice has disappeared, it sur- 
 vives, as is well known, in a fictitious form all over the 
 world. It is considered barely decent for the girl to come to 
 the marriage without a show of force. Even in polite 
 modern society the "best man" is said to be a survival of 
 the friends who went with the bridegroom in ancient days to 
 help him to carry off his bride, while the bridesmaids are the 
 lady's companions, who attempted to defend her from the 
 audacious robber, and the wedding tour is a survival of the 
 flight from the angry relatives of the bride. In the more 
 peaceful form of marriage hy purchase, the lady has become 
 an article of marketable value, whose price is paid, usually 
 in cattle or sheep, to her relatives or owners. It is a refine- 
 ment of modern days that the "bride-price" should be 
 settled on the lady herself, or contributed, in the form of 
 marriage gifts, to stock the future home. In ancient times 
 it was paid, if not in hard cash, at any rate in solid cattle, to 
 the damsel's relatives, who, by the marriage, lost the value 
 of her services. Jacob, we know, paid for his wives by 
 labour ; but this was probably an exception. In patriarchal 
 society, the father of a round dozen of strong and well- 
 favoured daughters is a rich man. 
 
 Slavery arises from the practice of keeping alive captives 
 taken in war, instead of putting them to death. In savage 
 days, wars are usually the result of scarcity of food, and, as 
 was pointed out previously (p. 14), result in the killing and 
 eating of members of a stranger "pack." But, with the 
 increasing certainty of food supply, resulting among other 
 benefits from pastoral pursuits, cannibalism becomes unnec- 
 essary, and captives are carefully kept alive, in order that 
 they may labour for their captors. It may sound odd to
 
 THE DOMESTICATION OF ANIMALS 29 
 
 speak of slavery as a beneficent institution, but one of the 
 first lessons which the student of history has to learn is, that 
 things which to us now seem very wicked may have really 
 been at one time improvements on something much worse. 
 Slavery is an ugly thing, but it is better than cannibalism. 
 Again, however, we notice that the upward step was due, 
 not to exalted morality, but to practical convenience. 
 Morality is the result, not the cause, of social amelioration. 
 
 The pastoral tribe.— Thus we have seen that pastoral 
 pursuits have converted the savage "pack," with its loose 
 system of association and marriage, into the pastoral tribe 
 with its fixed marriages and its relationship based strictly on 
 kinship through males. The woman leaves her own tribe or 
 household, and becomes a member of that of her husband. 
 The clumsy expedients of capture and purchase are resorted 
 to in order to continue the instinct, developed (as we have 
 seen) in the savage period, which forbids intermarriage be- 
 tween near relations. The precise distance of relationship 
 required probably settles whether the woman is to be cap- 
 tured from a neighbouring tribe or bought from another 
 household of the same tribe. And this rule probably varies 
 according to circumstances. But in either case the husband 
 is the sole authority in the household. His wives, children, 
 slaves and animals are under his absolute control, and all 
 stand pretty much on the same footing. 
 
 Mode of transition. — The precise steps in the mo- 
 mentous change from the loose marital relationship of sav- 
 ages to the definite (if somewhat brutal) institution of the 
 pastoral household are very hard to trace. The process has 
 been very ingeniously suggested by the late Mr. Robertson 
 Smith in his " Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia,'' where 
 the author points out the clear traces among the patriarchal 
 Arabs of the former existence of a savage state of society. 
 It is there suggested that the existence of a long condition 
 of war and disturbance would have had a similar result, by 
 drawing together the fighting males into groups for military
 
 30 A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 purposes, each male jealously guarding; his own women and 
 children. But there are inseparable difficulties in the way of 
 such an explanation. The patriarchal household would have 
 been the last thing that a warrior would have cared to en- 
 cumber himself with ; and times of military license are 
 hardly times in which the permanence of the marriage tie is 
 developed. On the whole, it seems tolerably certain that 
 the budding institution of property has been the main factor 
 in creating the patriarchal tribe and family. Our very word 
 "family" is said to be derived from an old Italian word 
 fainel, meaning "slave." 
 
 Other results of pastoral pursuits.— To conclude 
 this chapter, we may just hastily mention one or two other 
 important contributions made to the progress of civilization 
 by the domestication of animals. Obviously it would tend 
 largely to increase numbers and to improve physique, by the 
 greater abundance and regularity of food supply and the in- 
 crease of clothing and shelter. But also it would have the 
 important effect of differentiating in strength and impor- 
 tance one tribe from another, and one family from another. 
 Savages are, in the main, very much alike ; one savage tribe 
 is a good deal like another. But circumstances of climate, 
 and skill in breeding and rearing animals, would soon pro- 
 duce differences in the pastoral age. One tribe would 
 become wealthy, while another would remain poor. Even 
 in the same tribe some households would become richer 
 than others, according as, by superior strength or skill, one 
 housefather acquired more cattle than another. Early Irish 
 society was elaborately organized into classes, which dis- 
 tinguished between the ordinary freemen {NcmS) and the 
 rich cattle owners {Boaire), and between the various degrees 
 of wealth among the latter. And the primitive uniformity of 
 membership ultimately became quite broken up by the 
 practice, adopted by the rich Boaire, of lending their super- 
 fluous cattle to the poorer tribesmen in return for rents or 
 regular payments, as well as /eastings or occasional enter-
 
 THE DOMESTICATION OF ANIMALS 31 
 
 tainments of the cattle-owner, who visited his borrower from 
 time to time, no doubt under the pretence of seeing how his 
 cattle were getting on. 
 
 New ideas. — Once more, the domestication of animals is 
 responsible for two very important ideas, without which 
 civilized society could not hold together in its present form. 
 These are the ideas of profit and capital. The former is 
 now looked upon as the net gain in any commercial trans- 
 action. Originally it was the offspring of domestic animals. 
 The household which had a dozen goats in one year might 
 find itself, without any further captures, in possession of 
 twenty in the following. The idea gradually spread, and all 
 modem industry is based on it. Again, even if there were 
 no births in his flock, the pastoralist would find that, at any 
 rate for a time, he could go on living on the produce of his 
 animals, the milk of goats and cows, the wool of sheep, 
 without reducing his numbers. This discovery would tend 
 very powerfully to induce him to save his animals, i. e., not 
 to slaughter them, in order that they might produce constant 
 income. That is precisely what we mean by the term capital. 
 It is wealth saved to produce future wealth. But there was 
 no room for these great ideas in savage society. They are 
 the direct outcome of pastoral pursuits. So we see that the 
 lazy and overfed savage, who amused himself by taming and 
 petting his superfluous captive animals, was really beginning 
 a revolution in the world's history. It is rather curious that 
 the power of taming new animals seems to be almost 
 extinct among civilized men. Is this because all the tamable 
 animals have been tamed, or because civilized man has 
 become so unlike wild animals that he has lost the art of 
 understanding them ?
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 Tribal Organization 
 
 Wb now come to deal with the way in which society 
 organizes itself to satisfy the requirements of this pastoral 
 existence which we have tried to describe. And, in dealing 
 with this subject, by preference we will borrow our illustra- 
 tions from the Keltic peoples of the British Islands, who, 
 untiJ comparatively recent times, occupied the patriarchal 
 stage, and from those subjects of our Indian Empire, such 
 as the natives of the Panjab, who, even at the present day, 
 afford most valuable opportunities for the study of patri- 
 archal institutions. Occasionally we may refer to other 
 examples, such as the Homeric Greeks, the ancient Romans, 
 the Maoris of New Zealand and the Arabs, in order to 
 broaden our horizon, and to realize how widely spread is 
 this phase of development. But we shall gain in vividness 
 by keeping close to one model. 
 
 The tPibe. — In society of the patriarchal type the im- 
 portant group is, as we have said, the tribe, or body of 
 people believing themselves to be descended strictly in the 
 male line from some far-off ancestor. We say "believing 
 themselves," advisedly; for if our account of the origin of 
 the tribe be correct, the rule of male succession only 
 de\'eloped after the group had been in existence, perhaps 
 for thousands of years. But the intense belief in the exist- 
 ence from the beginning of the so-called agnatic* rule of 
 
 •The term is derived from Roman Law, which contrasted agnatio, or 
 connection through male ancestors, with cognatio or ordinary blood 
 relationship. 
 
 (32)
 
 TRIBAL ORGANIZATION 33 
 
 succession, is evidenced by the amusing attempts of the 
 tribesmen themselves to discover a single male ancestor, or, 
 as he is called by scientific writers, an eponym, for their tribe. 
 Thus, we find the chroniclers of British history deriving the 
 descent of their tribe from Brutus of Troy, the grandson of 
 ^neas ; the Cymry of Strathclyde are, in an early document, 
 said to be all descended from one Coel Hen, whose name is 
 supposed to survive in various place names in Ayrshire ; 
 each of the Teutonic tribes which settled in Britain alleged 
 its descent from the Scandinavian hero Odin ; the Behichis 
 of the Panjab profess to be the offspring of Mir Hamzah, an 
 uncle of the prophet Mahomet ; while the Pathans of the 
 same neighbourhood claim descent from Saul, the first king 
 of Israel ! 
 
 Membership of the tPibe.— Such being the importance 
 attached to male kinship, it is not surprising to discover 
 that, in tribal society, no one can be regarded as a full 
 member of the tribe unless he is the lawful child of a 
 full tribesman. Such a person is alone entitled, as of right, 
 to a share in the tribal possessions ; he alone can take part 
 in the religious ceremonies of the tribe. But, as a matter of 
 fact, all patriarchal tribes are found to have living among 
 them considerable numbers of strangers, who, though 
 separated by a great gulf from the full tribesmen, yet rank 
 in various degrees of social importance. There are, for 
 example, the mere "strangers," the Fiiidhir (as the Irish 
 called them), the Alltiids (as they are called by the Welsh 
 Laws), who appear to be broken men from other tribes, 
 adopted or protected on more or less hospitable terms. 
 Along with these, probably, go the offspring of the tribes- 
 women through marriages with such resident strangers. 
 Occasionally, in return for very great services, or after a 
 residence of many generations, such persons are fully 
 adopted into the tribe. 
 
 Serfs. — Then there were the various degrees of serfs or 
 bondmen ; for, as we have said, pastoral society was anxious
 
 34 A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 to secure cheap labour. These were, probably, the results 
 of forays upon neighbouring tribes, or people whom we 
 should call "convicts," who had become such through 
 failure to pay compensation for injuries committed by them, 
 according to the system to be afterwards explained. These 
 aervile persons were either employed as herdsmen or (some- 
 what later) as farm-labourers, such as the Sencleithe of 
 Ireland, or the Tceogs of Wales ; or they were treated as 
 domestic slaves {Bothachs or Caeths). 
 
 Ranks within the tplbe.— But it must not be supposed 
 that, even among the full tribesmen, equality of ranks was 
 the rule. True it is that every free tribesman was entitled to 
 his share of the grazing land, to his hunting in the waste, 
 to his oath of kindred (i. e., the protection of his immediate 
 relatives), and to his armour. But it is probable, as we have 
 said (p. 26), that, from the very first, the chief wealth of the 
 tribe; viz., its cattle and sheep, its camels and goats, were 
 looked upon as individual property ; and the tribesman who 
 was not fortunate enough to inherit or to capture a stock of 
 these was in a somewhat unenviable position. As the Irish 
 Laws put it, he was only a Fer Midba, or "inferior man," 
 not a Boaire, or "lord of cattle." In fact, he was very 
 much in the position of the modern "free" workman, who 
 often finds that his boasted freedom means freedom to 
 starve. 
 
 The nobles. — In this state of things he very frequently 
 resorted to an e.xpedient which is intensely interesting, as 
 being the earliest development of an institution which was 
 destined to play such a large part in the world's history: the 
 institution of landlordism. Only it was not, in these early 
 days, applied to land, which was not regarded as capable of 
 appropriation by individuals, but to cattle. The rich Boaire 
 loaned some of his cattle to the poor Fer Midba, who agreed 
 to take some of them for a certain period, and to pay an 
 annual Bestigi or food rent, being part of the produce, and 
 to feast the Boaire and his friends a certain number of times
 
 TRIBAL ORGANIZATION 35 
 
 in the year. Having the right to feed a certain number of 
 cattle on the tribal land, the borrower of cattle (or Ceile, as 
 he was called) could probably make enough to live on out 
 of the transaction. If he had some cattle of his own, he 
 was called a Saer Ceile, or free tenant ; but, if his whole 
 herd was borrowed, he became the Daer Ceile of the owner ; 
 not, technically, an unfree man, but a man in a very inferior 
 position. 
 
 Degrees of nobility. — Among the rich men, or nobles, 
 of the tribe, there were also many social degrees, according 
 to their wealth ; these, however, are not of great impor- 
 tance, except in relation to the system of blood fines, of 
 which we shall say something later. 
 
 Officials of the tribe.— But, besides these divisions 
 into free and unfree, nobles and ordinary freemen, the tribe 
 had a very important official organization. 
 
 I. The Chief, who was understood to represent the 
 founder of the tribe, and who was usually the oldest male in 
 a particular branch. Messrs. Spencer and Gillen have 
 pointed out that among the Australians, whom we have 
 taken as our types of savage society, there is nothing that 
 can be called a chieftainship, though there are, doubtless, 
 often certain individuals who, from their physical strength or 
 supposed wisdom, have great influence. But in patriarchal 
 society, there is always a representative of the tribe. The 
 Irish call him a Ri, the Welsh a Pen, the Scotch a Mormaer, 
 the Teutonic tribes a Cyning (whence our "king"), the 
 Bilijches a Tumanddr, the Pathans a Khan. He was heredi- 
 tary, not in our sense, but in the sense that the eldest male 
 An the privileged line was entitled to the office, unless dis- 
 qualified by feebleness or disease. The Welsh Laws pictur- 
 esquely describe him as "the oldest efficient man in the 
 kindred to the ninth descent, and a chief of household ; " 
 and they go on to enumerate his duties thus : — 
 
 (a) He must speak on behalf of his kin, and be lis- 
 tened to ;
 
 36 A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 (5) He must fight on behalf of his kin, and be feared ; 
 
 (c) He must give security on behalf of his kin, and be 
 accepted. 
 
 In other words, he must be eloquent, brave, and honest ; 
 and if a candidate for the position did not manifest these 
 qualities he might be set aside. This is probably all that is 
 meant by certain writers, when they say that the tribal chief 
 is "elective." Of course it was long before the days of 
 votes and ballot-boxes. 
 
 But, by an arrangement which shows a good deal of wis- 
 dom, some patriarchal tribes do not wait until the death of a 
 chief before accepting his successor. Amongst many of 
 them there is — 
 
 2. An Heip-AppaPent, called by the Irish the Tanist, 
 by the Welsh the Teisbanteuleu, who is the person who will 
 next succeed to the chieftainship, in the ordinary way, after 
 the death of the existing chief. After the break-up of the 
 tribes into clans or septs in Ireland, this practice continued in 
 the smaller bodies ; and it was its existence which did more 
 than anything else to scandalize the Elizabethan statesmen 
 who tried to bring the Irish to English notions. In Russia, 
 the institution lingered for a long while in the person of the 
 Veliki Kniaz, or Gravid Prince, the eldest male of the house 
 of Rurik, the chief of the Varangian or Norman tribe which 
 conquered Russia in the ninth century. Still longer it con- 
 tinued to be a feature of the Holy Roman Empire, which, 
 in addition to its head, or Emperor, had of right also his 
 destined successor, the " King of the Romans." During the 
 life-time of the chief, the heir-apparant acted as his deputy, 
 and was, so to speak, " learning the business." 
 
 3. The Champion. — This person, called among the 
 Irish and Scotch a Toisech, among the Welsh a Dialwr (or 
 "avenger"), among the Teutonic tribes a Heretoch (or 
 "host-leader"), is very interesting, both on account of his 
 ultimate destiny, as well as because he is an early instance of 
 what is called " specialization of functions." Originally, as
 
 TRIBAL ORGANIZATION 37 
 
 we have seen, the hereditary chief was also the head warrior 
 of the tribe. But, as the chief was hereditary, it would 
 often happen, in spite of the power of rejection claimed by 
 the tribe, that the chief was unsuccessful as an actual warrior. 
 He might be wise and venerable, much respected and loved, 
 but no soldier. In times of stress the tribe would naturally 
 turn to one of its members who had shown great bravery 
 and skill in fighting, and, by a sort of informal election, ap- 
 point him to lead them in battle, much as the Romans did, 
 at a much later stage, with their Dictator. Apparently, after 
 this event had occurred two or three times, the champion or 
 head warrior became a recognized insiitutio7i. 
 
 All these three officials, the Chief, the Heir- Apparent, and 
 the Champion, seem to have been provided for by the en- 
 dowment of special rights in the tribal land, by an extra 
 share of the booty captured by the tribe on its plundering ex- 
 peditions, and by customary presents made on certain days 
 of the year by the members of their tribes. The first of 
 these three privileges is of special importance in the History 
 of Politics. 
 
 4. The Council, or group of seniors, called by the Irish 
 Brehons, by the Welsh Henadwr, by the Teutons Rachim- 
 burgs, by the Mahommedan inho^sjirgah, and by the Hindus 
 Panchdyat. This seems to have been a body of persons 
 gradually formed from the heads of the subordinate gp-oups 
 in the tribe, by a process which we shall have to explain 
 in dealing with the formation of clans. Its great function 
 was to record the custom of the tribe, and regulate its cere- 
 monies and religion. It was, obviously, a most necessary 
 institution after the tribe had become numerous, and in days 
 which could boast no written records. It is most interesting 
 as the germ of future constitutional government, and may be 
 regarded, historically, as the mother of Law Courts, Cabi- 
 nets, and even of Parliaments. Sometimes, as amongst the 
 Welsh, and some of the Teutonic tribes, it seems to have 
 consisted of a small number (seven) ; at others it was ob-
 
 38 A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 viously larger, and may have consisted of all the heads of 
 households within the tribe. Later on, its members appear 
 to have developed individual functions, as pedigree-keepers 
 (called by the Irish and Scotch Synnar/iies), priests (possibly, 
 among the Welsh, Druids), medicine men, and so on. But 
 it is with the elders as a body or cauncil, that we are most 
 concerned : and the mention of it brings us to the considera- 
 tion of two closely connected topics; viz., Tribal Religion 
 and Tribal Law, with an account of which this chapter may 
 fitly end. 
 
 Tribal Religion is a striking testimony to the truth of 
 the view previously quoted (p. 12), that the second stage of 
 religious thought is that in which Man worships as his gods 
 beings who are, or have been, men like himself, who are, in 
 fact, his deceased ancestors. Ancestor worship, which, even 
 at the present day, is the religion of multitudes of the human 
 race, especially in the East, seems to arise from two sources. 
 The one is a profound belief in the existence of the spirit 
 world, in which the dead live and move as in life ; and which 
 may, therefore, be fairly claimed as a crude form of belief in 
 the immortality of the soul. The second is the profound 
 deference to parental authority rendered during life to the 
 head of the patriarchal household, and which, after his 
 death, takes the form of ceremonial worship. In its more 
 cruel shape, this worship is celebrated with sacrifices, either 
 by way of vengeance upon the men who have caused, or are 
 supposed to have caused, the death of the ancestor, or by 
 way of providing him with comforts in the spirit-land. In its 
 more refined form, it is a continuance of domestic worship, 
 as exhibited, for example, in the picturesque ceremonial of 
 the offerings of cake and water, the sacrificial meal and the 
 commemoration hymns, of the Code of Manu and other 
 Hindu rituals. The centre of ancestor worship is \.\\Q/amity 
 hearth, with its sacred fire and solemn festivities ; and its 
 continued practice is thus calculated to keep alive, in the 
 most vivid way, that spirit of kinship which is the very
 
 TRIBAL ORGANIZATION 39 
 
 essence of patriarchal society. It may, perhaps, be doubted 
 whether ancestor worship plays quite such an important part 
 in the daily life of the Hindu as the Sacred Books would 
 lead us to believe ; but it is undoubted that its existence ac- 
 counts for much that is otherwise obscure, not only in 
 Oriental Society, but in the history of the early Greeks and 
 Romans. Readers who are interested in pursuing this line of 
 thought may be advised to consult the late Mr. Fustel de 
 Coulanges' famous book "La Cit^ Antique;" here it will 
 be sufficient to state, by way of contrast, two or three of the 
 leading features in which the ancestor worship of patriarchal 
 society differs from religion as understood by the modem 
 world. 
 
 1. It is not proselytizing.— The great religions of the 
 modem world — Christianity, Mohammedanism, even Buc^- 
 dhism — profess to be of universal application, and their mis 
 sionaries seek to make converts in all lands. To an ances- 
 tor worshipper such a course would appear not merely 
 ridiculous, but positively treacherous. His gods are for him 
 and his kindred alone; he looks to them for favour and pro- 
 tection, as one of their devout descendants. How could 
 strangers possibly have any share in their worship? As a 
 consequence, the patriarchal man who wandered away from 
 his kindred found himself not only among strange people, 
 but among strange gods. To him, expulsion from the tribe 
 meant the break up of religious as well as social ties. An 
 Englishman of the present day who settles in France, Ger- 
 many, Italy or Spain, enters a place of worship, and finds 
 the same God worshipped, under slightly different forms and 
 in a different tongue (unless he be a Catholic), but by wor- 
 shippers of the same faith. To an ancestor worshipper, 
 such an experience would seem incredible. 
 
 2. It is not theological. — That is to say, it does not 
 profess to account for the origin and constitution of the uni- 
 verse. No doubt the patriarchal man had certain crude 
 ways of explaining the existence of the world and its con-
 
 40 A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 tents. But these were not part of his religion. It was not 
 until the later speculative spirit, introduced into Europe by 
 the Greeks, attempted to link intellectual belief with religious 
 duty, that the modern kind of religion began. Even then, 
 as we learn from more than one passage in the New Testa- 
 ment,* concerning "meats oflfered to idols," some of the 
 early Christian converts considered it quite possible to com- 
 bine an intellectual acceptance of Christianity with a con- 
 tinuance of their ancestral rites. Ancestor worship, in fact, 
 was a purely practical religion, imposing a code of duties on 
 its followers, but making no demands upon their belief. 
 
 3. It Is secpet. — The view that their ancestors belonged 
 to them alone naturally made the tribesmen very jealous of 
 strangers acquiring any knowledge of their forms of worship. 
 Consequently, the most rigid care was taken by each tribe, 
 and, after the tribe split up into sections, by each section, to 
 prevent a knowledge of these ceremonies leaking out; and 
 many of the most dramatic stories of ancient history turn 
 upon the vengeance taken upon interlopers who had 
 succeeded in penetrating the mysteries of religious celebra- 
 tions. In each household, the particulars of its sacred rites 
 were passed on from father to son in the greatest secrecy. 
 The secrets of the tribe were in the custody of the elders or 
 wise men, who, in somewhat more advanced times, formed 
 themselves into hereditary bodies, or colleges, for their 
 preservation and practice. The very existence of the tribe 
 was believed to depend upon the safeguarding of these 
 mysteries ; and, if a disaster happened, one of the readiest 
 suggestions to account for the mishap was that the ancestors 
 were offended, because "strange fire" had been offered on 
 their altar. 
 
 Tribal Law.— Closely connected with Tribal Religion, 
 in fact originally part of it, was Tribal Law. One of the 
 direct results of ancestor worship was a religious adherence 
 
 *E. g., Acts XV. 29.
 
 TRIBAL ORGANIZATION 41 
 
 to ancestral custom: that is, to the practices observed in life 
 by the revered ancestors. And this was the main idea of Law, 
 as conceived by patriarchal society. The notion of Law as 
 the command of an absolute ruler, whether an individual 
 or a body, was yet far in the future. Law was not a thing to 
 be fnade, but a thing to be discovered. The old savage 
 notion of taboo, which, as we saw, was purely negative, had 
 been largely superseded by the positive notion of custom. 
 What was customary was right, what was uncustomary was 
 wrong. The desperate tenacity with which patriarchal society 
 clung to a practice, merely because it was a practice, is 
 illustrated, among hundreds of other examples, by the well- 
 known Roman custom of examining the entrails of victims 
 to ascertain the prospects of an expedition. Originally, no 
 doubt, it was a practical expedient adopted by the nomad 
 tribes from which the Romans were descended, in their 
 wanderings through unknown country. To test the fitness 
 for food of the new herbs with which they came into contact, 
 they caused a few of their cattle and sheep to eat them, and 
 then, by a sort of rude post-mortem, judged of the result. 
 The real origin of customs is often very hard, however, to 
 discover. Sometimes it seems to have been mere accident. 
 The ingenious account of the origin of roast sucking pig, 
 given by Charles Lamb in his well-known Essay, though 
 intended by him as a joke, may really be a brilliant guess at 
 the truth. In other cases, no doubt, an exceptionally able 
 man deliberately made an innovation, which was afterwards 
 copied by others, as it was found to be useful. But such 
 enterprise must have been very dangerous. The first man 
 who drank the milk of his cow probably paid for his luxury 
 with his life. In patriarchal society, innovation and crime 
 are almost co-incident. So little, indeed, is deliberate de- 
 parture from custom anticipated, that there seems to be no 
 regular punishment for it. The chief or elders will declare 
 the custom ; that is, or ought to be, sufficient. But if an 
 offender persists in his impiety, the outraged community will
 
 42 A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 banish him from its ranks. In the expressive language of the 
 Welsh Laws, he will be a " kin-shattered man," an outlaw, 
 in fact. If the tribe lives near the sea he will probably be 
 set adrift on an open raft ; this was the method with the 
 South Welsh. Other codes speak of turning the offender 
 " into the forest." In either case, the result would be much 
 the same. 
 
 The blood feud. — For injuries to individual fellow- 
 tribesmen, the universal remedy was the lex talionis, admin- 
 istered by the blood feud. Barbarous as such an institution 
 seems to us, it is probably one of the most important steps 
 ever taken towards civilization. A man is killed. Instead 
 of the murder producing indiscriminate slaughter, it gives 
 rise to an ordered scheme of vengeance conducted by the 
 immediate relatives of the slain man against the murderer 
 and his immediate relatives. If there be any doubt about 
 the facts, certain rough tests are applied, which to us would 
 appear very unsatisfactory. The accused brings a certain 
 number of his relatives to swear to his innocence, or some 
 rude sort of ordeal is used.* If the accused is deemed 
 guilty, the feud goes on, unhappily for a very long time. 
 
 Blood fines. — A great step further is taken, when, for 
 the right of vengeance is substituted the payment of compen- 
 sation. The circumstances of pastoral society permit of this. 
 The existence of cattle and sheep form a standard of value, 
 by which the life of a man can be measured. Starting with the 
 simple idea that a man is worth what he owns, and taking the 
 ordinary free tribesman as the unit, the tribe sets up an elab- 
 orate scale of money fines (the eric of the Irish, the galanas 
 of the Welsh, the cro of the Scotch, the wer of the Teutons), 
 carefully graduated according to ( i ) the importance of the 
 injured party, (2) the extent of the damage. Apparently, 
 
 ♦One of these probably survives, in backward countries, to the 
 present day. Each of the mourners touches the body at a funeral. 
 The ancient belief was that if the touch was that of the murderer 
 the corpse would bleed afresh.
 
 TRIBAL ORGANIZATION 43 
 
 the proceedings begin as before. The marks on the dead 
 man's body are examined, the bloody weapon is traced, the 
 trail of the stolen cattle is followed until it leads to the thief's 
 hut ; and then, just as the feud is going to begin, the elders 
 intervene and urge the acceptance of a fine. At first, it 
 would seem, the acquiescence of the injured party is volun- 
 tary. Until quite late in history, the ultimate right to battle 
 cannot be denied. But every effort is made by the elders to 
 induce the parties to "swear the peace." In the world-wide 
 habit of shaking hands, we probably have a dim survival of 
 a practice insisted upon by the early peace-makers, as a 
 guarantee that the parties would not use weapons against 
 one another, at least till all other remedies had been tried. 
 For if the hand is clasped in another's, it can hardly strike a 
 blow. 
 
 No grenepal rules of Tribal Law.— It is obvious 
 from what has been said that, while we may describe the 
 general character of Tribal Law, no enumeration of its rules 
 can be made. Each tribe has its own Law, binding only 
 upon members of its own tribe. General principles will, no 
 doubt, be found running through it all ; inheritance in the 
 male line, prohibition of marriage outside the tribe (or inside, 
 as the case may be), relationship of classes, rights in pasture 
 land, and so on. But in details these will differ from tribe to 
 tribe, and even in branches of the same tribe. The investiga- 
 tions of the British Settlement Officers show, for example, 
 that there are at least several hundred different systems in 
 force in the British Panjab alone, though the population of 
 that country is a little less than the population of England. 
 Long before there is a Law of the Land, there is a Law of 
 the Tribe ; and by his own Law alone will a tribesman con- 
 sent to rule his actions.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 Agriculture and the Clan 
 
 Origin of agPieultUPe.— As in the case of the taming 
 of wild animals, so in the case of tilling the ground, we are 
 left in the dark as to the benefactor who first made the 
 priceless discovery. Such scanty legends as exist on the 
 subject are evidently the work of later times, or refer to an 
 importation rather than to a discovery of the secret. 
 
 But, if we have no evidence on the subject, it is one on 
 which we may fairly indulge in scientific speculation. 
 Although the Australian aboriginals know nothing of 
 agriculture, they gather the seeds of a wild plant known 
 as iiardoo, and, after bruising them in a rude mortar, make 
 them into cakes. Let us suppose, in some country endowed 
 with greater natural wealth than central Australia, that a 
 pack of savages, having gathered a greater store of wild 
 seeds than it could possibly consume, buried the surplus in 
 some earth-heap or mound, and left it in the summer camp 
 till the return of spring. Suppose an unusually wet winter, 
 or an exceptionally early spring. Returning to its summer 
 quarters, the pack might well discover that the stored-up 
 grains had sprouted and assumed something like the shape 
 in which they had known the ears when they had gathered 
 them in the forest the previous autumn. .Such an object- 
 lesson would hardly be lost, even on the savage mind. The 
 same thing might well happen to the wild yams or other 
 edible roots which are some of the earliest food of man. 
 
 Charaetep of agpieulture. — Whenever the savage 
 
 (44)
 
 AGRICULTURE AND THE CLAN 45 
 
 had begun to act upon the idea this suggested, agricuhure, 
 in its most primitive form, would have come into existence. 
 The rest was only a question of time. And it is quite pos- 
 sible that agriculture, in a ver>' imperfect form, was prac- 
 ticed as early as pastoral pursuits, at least in the majority of 
 cases. But it is not difficult to see why agriculture takes 
 rank as a development of human industry distinctly later 
 than the tending of cattle and sheep. It is very much more 
 laborious ; and man, especially primitive man, has no love 
 of work for its own sake. Compared with the hard toil of 
 the husbandman, the life of the shepherd is easy and enjoy- 
 able. The capture and breaking-in of wild animals is, to the 
 savage nature, a fascinating task ; the one gratifies his love 
 of excitement, the other amuses his hours of idleness. Even 
 the driving abroad of flocks and herds to daily pasture is no 
 exacting task. The milking, the dressing of skins, and the 
 spinning and weaving of the pastoralist's life are chiefly done 
 by the women and children. But the primitive curse is upon 
 the tiller of the soil : " in the sweat of thy face shalt thou 
 eat bread." 
 
 Reasons for its adoption. — Agriculture, therefore, 
 remains for ages, even after its rudiments are known, a mere 
 supplementary pursuit, practiced for the purpose of pro- 
 viding a few luxuries, rather than the substantial occupation 
 of Man. It is not adopted on a large scale till the increase 
 of population (always the result of a step forward in civiliza- 
 tion) begins to press upon the means of subsistence. One 
 of the most striking facts about agriculture is that, though its 
 service is hard, its produce is infinitely greater than that of 
 pasturage. A learned German writer. Dr. August Meitzen, 
 who has devoted his life to the study of questions connected 
 with land settlement, calculates that an area which, used as 
 a cattle-run, will maintain one hundred people, will, if 
 brought under the plough, feed three or four times that 
 number, and leave a substantial margin over. Probably the 
 practice of agriculture, on a large scale, began in the Delta
 
 46 A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 of the Nile and the Mesopotamian countries, where the 
 barren desert afforded little pasturage for cattle, but the rich 
 alluvial valleys of the great rivers rendered agriculture easy 
 and profitable. From thence it spread through Asia Minor, 
 northwards and westwards, till it became known throughout 
 Europe, and was gradually adopted as the needs of the 
 population demanded it. When Cassar says of the Germans 
 that they do not "study" agriculture,* he probably does not 
 mean that they had never heard of it, but that they found it 
 easier to satisfy themselves with milk, cheese and flesh, the 
 produce of pastoral pursuits. There is a very interesting 
 passage in the "Book of the Abbey of Clonmacnoise," 
 which tells of Ireland that "there was not ditch nor fence 
 nor stone wall round land till came the period of the sons of 
 Aed Slane (seventh century A. D. ), but smooth fields. 
 Because of the abundance of the households in their period, 
 therefore it is that they introduced boundaries in Ireland.'''' 
 Some writers (e. g., Mr. Seebohm) take this passage to refer 
 to the breaking-up of open arable fields into small enclosed 
 holdings. But there seems little doubt that what the 
 chronicler is really referring to is the general adoption of 
 agriculture in the place of pasturage, because of the abun- 
 dance of the households. There is, in fact, plenty of evidence 
 to prove that Ireland was once a purely pastoral country. 
 
 Early methods of agriculture. — But we must not 
 suppose that the adoption of agriculture meant the adoption, 
 all at once, of farming as we understand it. Perhaps it will 
 be interesting to give a hasty sketch of the different stages 
 through which the cultivation of the ground has passed. 
 Afterwards we may pass to the still more important subject 
 of the results of the adoption of agriculture. 
 
 I. Forest clearings. — The beginnings of agriculture 
 nearly always involved clearing the ground, for the simple 
 reason that the most fertile land is sure to be covered with 
 
 , *"AgricuUur8e non student." ( De Bello Gallico, vi. ai.)
 
 AGRICULTURE AND THE CLAN 47 
 
 the rank growth of ages. Doubtless, much land had 
 already been cleared for pasture ; but people are unwilling 
 to sacrifice this for the apparently uncertain prospects of 
 harvest. Sometimes the forest is cleared by burning, the 
 ashes being used as a sort of primitive manure, and the 
 seed being simply thrown in and left to come up with the 
 forest weeds. In other places, the axe is used, and the 
 ground, when cleared, broken up with the mattock, or 
 primitive hoe, which seems to have been an early modifica- 
 tion of the savage's digging-stick. 
 
 Extensive cultivation. — The ground thus cleared is 
 cropped year after year, until one of the fundamental laws 
 of nature begins to assert itself ; viz., that a repetition of the 
 same crop on the smne land tends to produce barrenness. 
 The returns are less and less each year, till the ground is 
 abandoned in despair (probably being deemed accursed), 
 and a new patch is taken into cultivation. This agriculture 
 is technically called extensive, and is, of course, very ex- 
 travagant, both in labour and land. 
 
 2. Field-grass system. — Although the clearings are 
 thus abandoned for purposes of sowing, they act as a sort of 
 rough pasture, or fallow, for the cattle of the community, 
 who pick up a scanty subsistence from the shoots and weeds 
 remaining after the reaping of the last crop. In tropical 
 countries, such as India, and even in subtropical lands, such 
 as the fertile districts of southern Australia, abandoned 
 patches speedily become again converted into "jungle" or 
 "bush," and explorers of later generations are startled to 
 find, in the depths of the forest, traces which point indis- 
 putably to the existence of former cultivation.* 
 
 Alternations of CFop and fallow.— But, in temperate 
 zones, the land is not covered again with trees, and, after 
 the newly-reclaimed patches have been themselves ex- 
 hausted, the tribesmen return to their old patches and 
 
 * No doubt this fact accounts for a good many of the so-called " dis- 
 coveries of pre-historic races."
 
 48 A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 plough these again, to save tliemselves the trouble of fur- 
 ther clearing. Then is discovered another great secret of 
 Nature; viz., that, though successive crops of the same 
 kind will exhaust a piece of land, yet, if that same piece is 
 left to lie fallow for a time, it will recover its fertility. This 
 discover}' lead? directly to — 
 
 3. The two-field system, in which the community 
 keeps two distinct patches of land at work, sowing one in 
 each alternate year, and leaving the other to lie fallow. This 
 .system of agriculture is widely prevalent in backward coun- 
 tries at the present day. 
 
 4. The three-field system. — This, which is really an 
 improved variety of the last system, is due to the still further 
 discovery that, although a continuation of the same crop on 
 the same piece of land exhausts it very quickly, an alterna- 
 tion of crops will not exhaust it so quickly. The plan is, 
 therefore, to have three fields and two different crops going 
 on at once, the third field lying fallow once in every three 
 years, instead of once in every two. Thus, in a course of 
 three years — 
 
 1st year— Field A = oats B = beans C = fallow 
 and " — " B = oats C = beans A = fallow 
 3rd " — " C = oats A ^ beans B = fallow 
 
 and so on for each triennial period. 
 
 Question between the two-field and the three- 
 field system. — The advantages of this plan, in the in- 
 creased variety of crops, was early perceived ; but, for a long 
 time, people preferred to work it with the two-field system, 
 by dividing the ploughed field each year into two parts. In 
 fact, they were afraid that the other s\'stem would require 
 too much ploughing. During the later Middle Ages this 
 was a "burning question" in western Europe. But the 
 three-field people won the day, as they were bound to do; 
 and their argument is so triumphant and so neat that it is 
 worth while to set it out. We take first an imaginary area 
 of 180 acres, divided into two fields, one of which lies fallow
 
 AGRICULTURE AND THE CLAN 
 
 49 
 
 every year, while the other is partly under oats and partly 
 under beans or peas. Thus — 
 
 A (90 acres). B (90 acres). 
 
 A I. 
 
 (45 acres.) 
 
 Bi. 
 
 (45 acres.) 
 
 A 2. 
 (45 acres.) 
 
 B 2. 
 
 (45 acres.) 
 
 Now take an imaginary course during any one year. 
 
 September. Plough A i , and sow oats = 45 acres 
 
 March. Plough As, and sow beans = 45 acres 
 
 June. Plough B (whole) twice* and leave 
 
 fallow =j8o acres 
 
 Total ploughing 270 acres 
 
 Now take the same area divided into three fields. 
 
 A (60 acres). B (60 acres). C (60 acres). 
 
 Again a year's ploughing : 
 
 September. Plough A and sow oats = 60 acres 
 
 March. Plough B and sow beans = 60 acres 
 
 June. Plough C twice, and leave fallow . . = 120 acres 
 
 Total 240 acres 
 
 ♦This is necessary after the crop, to get rid of stubble. 
 
 D
 
 go A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 i. e., actually 30 acres less of ploughing. But that is not aO. 
 For, if we look back we see that, if we have worked our 
 lands on the two-field system, we have only harvested the 
 crops of 90 acres ; but, if we have used the three-field sys- 
 tem, we have taken the produce of 120 acres. Thus, the 
 three-field system beats the two-field, hands down ; and it is 
 not surprising to find that, in medieval Europe, it became 
 the rule in the most progressive countries, and developed a 
 regular set of names. Thus, in England, the autumn- 
 sowing was called the iilth grain, the spring sowing the 
 eich grain, and the idle field the fallow ; and there are 
 corresponding terms in many other countries. 
 
 5. Convertible husbandry. — The three-field system 
 reigned supreme in western Europe, until, at a compara- 
 tively recent date, it was abandoned in favour of a still more 
 economical plan, by which fallows are practically abolished, 
 and, by a great increase in the number and variety of crops, 
 and the use of artificial manures, the land is never (in good 
 hands) allowed to get exhausted. This change, which came 
 about in England in the eighteenth centur>', and which was 
 greatly due to special circumstances, such as the Dutch 
 connection and war prices, is, however, closely connected 
 with an important change, not merely in the methods, but in 
 the orgatiizalion of agriculture, that is to say, in the institu- 
 tions by means of which agriculture is worked.* To this we 
 must now turn our attention. 
 
 Organization of agpieulture. — At the end of the 
 Middle Ages (as we call them), that is to say, when the 
 revival of learning in Europe and the Reformation began to 
 break up the old order of things, the typical agricultural 
 unit, not only throughout Europe, but among the vast popu- 
 lations of India, Egypt and Persia, was the village or town- 
 ship. At first sight, a village appears to be merely a collec- 
 
 ♦All these five stages of agricultural method may be observed at 
 work in Sweden at the present day.
 
 AGRICULTURE AND THE CLAN 51 
 
 tion of farmers and labourers, cultivating pieces of land 
 which happen to be near together. And such, in fact, the 
 modern village of western Europe generally is. The In- 
 habitants are, in fact, merely neighbours, nothing more. But 
 the medieval village was a great deal more ; and the differ- 
 ence is usually expressed by describing it as a village com- 
 munity. There has been a good deal of nonsense talked 
 about the village community, as if it necessarily meant a 
 socialistic group of people, who do their work and hold the 
 proceeds in common. Such an assertion cannot possibly be 
 made of historical times. Whatever may be our view of the 
 origin of the medieval village, it is quite clear that, in his- 
 torical times, we have practically no evidence of an agricul- 
 tural group (larger than a single household) cultivating its 
 field in common and dividing the proceeds. So far as our 
 evidence goes, each farmer has his own land, and reaps and 
 stores his own harvest. Nevertheless, there is a real mean- 
 ing in the phrase village community, and we shall best bring 
 out that meaning by enumerating half a dozen points in 
 which the average village of the sixteenth century differed 
 from the average English (or French or German) village of 
 the nineteenth century. 
 
 1. Open fields. — In the first place, we notice a purely 
 physical difference. There were practically no hedges in the 
 medieval village. The arable land of the village lay in 
 great open fields, many hundreds of acres in extent, sepa- 
 rated from one another and from the meadow and waste 
 only by balks, or banks of unploughed turf, on which grew 
 trees here and there. The beautiful hedges of the modern 
 English countrj'^side are the result of the great enclosure 
 m.ovement, of which we shall have to speak later on. This 
 difference, of course, need not have been connected with a 
 difference in the methods of agriculture. As a matter of 
 fact it was so connected. 
 
 2. Equality of holdings. — In a modern village, the 
 farms will be of all sorts of sizes, determined by the circum-
 
 52 A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 stances of the case. But if we examine the terrier, or 
 ground-plan, of a medieval village, in which the lands 
 worked by each farmer are distinguished, we shall notice a 
 curious thing. We shall see that there is a tendency towards 
 equality of holdings. There will be a great many farmers 
 with about thirty acres of plough-land each. There will 
 probably also be one or two much larger holdings, e. g., 120 
 acres, also more or less equal among themselves, and, what 
 is still more curious, bearing a fixed proportion to the 
 smaller holdings, usually of four to one. There will also be 
 a number of people, obviously in an inferior position, hold- 
 ing little plots or patches cleared from the waste. Finally, 
 there will probably be a great man, who has a big house 
 and park (or enclosure), as well as a great deal of land in 
 the open fields. 
 
 3. Forced labour. — Corresponding with this strongly 
 marked division of classes, there will be found, if the affairs 
 of the medieval village be further investigated, a curious 
 system, by which the two poorer classes in the village render 
 labour services to the richer, not, as agricultural labourers 
 do now, for wages, but as part of the terms on which they 
 hold their land. The poorer class, or cottagers, will, prac- 
 tically, be working almost entirely for the lord, as he would 
 be called in Europe, for the agha in Persia, for the zatnindar 
 in India, possibly also for the few rich farmers, if such ex- 
 isted. But the ordinary small farmer, the yardling, as the 
 English called him, will also have to work for the lord, 
 though probably only a comparatively small part of his 
 time. Indeed, in many cases, he will probably have coni- 
 poimded for his labour dues by payment of a fixed money 
 rent, and so will be what we should call an ordinary tenant 
 farmer. Nevertheless he will clearly at one time have been 
 a serf ; i. e., a man who has to work for another, whether he 
 likes it or not. 
 
 4. Intepmixed plots. — Now-a-days, the land of each 
 farmer in a village lies in a more or less compact mass. The
 
 AGRICULTURE AND THE CLAN 53 
 
 farmer would consider it a great hardship and waste of time 
 if it did not. But the farmer in a medieval village not only 
 had his holding divided amongst the two (or three) great 
 fields into which the arable land of the village was marked 
 off (for cultivation according to the rotation of crops pre- 
 viously described), but, even in each of these three fields, 
 his holding was not compact, it was split up into a large num- 
 ber of small strips (usually about half an acre each) scattered 
 all over the field. Besides his 30 acres or so of arable, he 
 would also have the right to turn so many cattle and sheep 
 into the meadow of the village, except at the time of hay 
 growth, when the meadow would be temporarily enclosed 
 with hurdles, and then he would get the hay of a small plot. 
 Finally, he would have the right to turn so many inferior 
 beasts — donkeys, geese, swine — on to the waste, or uncul- 
 tivated land of the village, and also to cut turf and wood 
 therefrom for fuel and repairs. Thus we see that his holding, 
 which always included a house in the village, was a complete 
 outfit, so far as land was concerned. 
 
 Closely connected with the " intermixed " character of the 
 farms was the practice of shifting, or redistributing, the 
 plots held by a farmer at stated intervals. This practice had 
 ceased in the more progressive parts of Europe long before 
 the end of the Middle Ages ; but in Sweden and Denmark 
 there were clear traces of its existence ; in India, under the 
 name of vesh, it was well known, and in Persia, even at the 
 present day, it frequently takes place under the management 
 of the headman of the village. 
 
 5. Customary management. —This feature which, 
 perhaps, distinguishes the medieval village more clearly 
 than any other from the modern village, was a necessary 
 result of the system of intermixed holdings. All the work 
 of the village was settled by a rigid system of rules, handed 
 down from remote ages, which prescribed exactly when and 
 how each operation should be begun, done, and ended. 
 Now-a-days each farmer manages his lands as he thinks
 
 54 A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 best, subject to the terms of his agreement with his land- 
 lord. If fanner Jones thinks it wise to cut his hay on Mon- 
 day, he is not obliged to wait for farmer Smith, who thinks 
 that Thursday will be better. Each farmer cuts his hay 
 when he thinks best. But this sort of independence would 
 have been impossible when the lands of all the different 
 farmers were mixed up together. The village was fixed in 
 the grip of custom, and one of the chief reasons why agri- 
 culture was for so many centuries unprogressive, was just 
 because the enterprising farmer could not act without con- 
 vincing the whole of his fellow-villagers. 
 
 6. Officials. — Now-a-days the ordinary village perhaps 
 has its policeman, and maybe its tnaire or chairman of 
 parish council ; but the policeman is probably appointed and 
 paid by a distant authority, and the maire or chairman has 
 very little real power. In the Middle Ages, each village had 
 an elaborate staflf of officials, whose duty it was to work for 
 the whole village. First, there was the headman or reeve, 
 chosen from or, it may even be, by the villagers, who repre- 
 sented the villagers as a whole, was responsible to the lord 
 for their labour dues, enforced the customs, and was the 
 mouthpiece of the village in its dealings with the outside 
 world. The position, though it doubtless carried (as it still 
 does in India and Persia) certain privileges, was not without 
 its drawbacks ; and there are some traces of a rule that its 
 acceptance was compulsory. Then, too, there was a constable 
 or beadle, whose duty it was to carry messages round the 
 village, to summon the villagers to meet under the sacred 
 tree, and generally to enforce the orders of the reeve and 
 moot, or meeting of the villagers. Then there was thepomid- 
 keeper, who seized straying beasts and kept them in custody 
 till their owners made fine to the village chest ; the parker, 
 or common-keeper, whose duty it was to tend the cattle and 
 sheep in the meadow, and to see that no one put in more 
 than his proper share or stint; the swine-herd, who led the 
 swine of the village daily to the wood to grub for acorns ;
 
 AGRICULTURE AND THE CLAN 55 
 
 the goose-herd, and so on. In many villages, all over the 
 world, it was the duty of the village to provide watchmen, at 
 least during certain times of the year, to guard the flocks at 
 night. We find our English Edward I., in his great Statute 
 of Winchester, insisting that the custom should be kept up ; 
 and the "Watch" were a standing joke in Shakespeare's 
 time. In India and other Oriental countries, even at the 
 present day, the village carpenter, potter, blacksmith, 
 cobbler, etc., are real officials, provided for, like the other 
 officials, by an allowance of land, which is plowed and sown 
 for them by the farmers, while they, in return, must give 
 their labour to any villager who may require it. Doubtless 
 it was so at one time in Europe. 
 
 Opigin of the village.— This description will have 
 been sufficient to show that the medieval village, though 
 not that socialistic community which platform orators have 
 delighted to describe it, was a very highly organized and 
 closely compacted body, something utterly different from the 
 mere groups of independent farmers in modern Europe, 
 usually held together, if at all, only by the fact that they are 
 tenants of the same landlord. 
 
 Two views. — Now, concerning the origin of this village 
 community, a conflict fierce, and, it is to be feared, somewhat 
 acrimonious, has raged. For, whilst we have had great con- 
 troversialists, such as Mr. Seebohm, Professor Vinogradofl, 
 Professor Maitland (who can hardly be called a controver- 
 sialist at all), and M. Fustel de Coulanges, who have all 
 combined great learning with perfect courtesy, we have also, 
 unhappily, had inferior controversy from apologists of par- 
 ticular theories, who have not always observed the courtesies 
 of scholarship. Briefly speaking, and putting aside minor 
 details, the rival views are (i) that the typical village was 
 originally a h2Lndt.oi kinsmen working for themselves; (2) 
 that it was originally a group of serfs (or slaves) working for 
 a master. Mr. Seebohm and M. Fustel de Coulanges take 
 the latter view; Professor Vinogradoff and (with reserva-
 
 I 
 
 56 A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 tions) Professor Maitland take the former. It is so ex- 
 tremely unlikely that the views of any of these eminent and 
 learned men are totally baseless, that is a pleasing task to 
 the author to suggest a solution of the difficulty which shall 
 combine the views of both sides. 
 
 Glancing back for a moment at our account of Tribal 
 Organization, we shall remember, in the first place, that, 
 though what may be called the average tribesmen were free- 
 born kinsmen of each other, there was also attached to each 
 tribe a body of strangers, in a more or less inferior and 
 servile position. Furthermore, we shall remember that, 
 among the Irish and kindred races, the rich tribesman fre- 
 quently loaned out part of his cattle to poorer freemen, in 
 return for an annual payment or rent, and certain feastifigs 
 or entertainments. Finally, we shall remember that each 
 tribe had its chief or head, who was endowed with special 
 privileges, and who received various gifts and offerings from 
 the tribesmen. Here at once we have a division of patri- 
 archal society into ranks, which correspond in a most 
 curious way with the divisions in an ordinary village com- 
 munity, as described in this chapter. The tribal chief cor- 
 responds with the village lord or agha, the rich tribesmen 
 with the holders of large farms, the poor tribesmen with the 
 yardlings, or thirty -acre men, the "strangers" with the 
 cottagers or serfs of the village. 
 
 Similapity between tribal and village opganiza- 
 tion. — But, after all, such a coincidence may be merely 
 casual. We have no right to say that it proves the connec- 
 tion between the tribe and the village. As a matter of fact, 
 there are substantial differences to be accounted for ; and it 
 is by the neglect to explain such differences that historians 
 claiming to be scientific incur ridicule. For example, in the 
 tribe, the poor Ceile, or holders of stock, pay their rents, not 
 to the chief, but to their individual cattle- owners, while, in 
 the village, the labour services of t\\e yardlitigs are rendered 
 almost wholly to the lord. As a matter of fact, there is an
 
 AGRICULTURE AND THE CLAN 57 
 
 important transition step between the tribe and the village, 
 namely, the clan; and it is for evidence of the nature and 
 origin of this body that we must look. 
 
 The Flaith.— Fortunately, it is not very hard to find. 
 If we look once more at our "Ancient Laws of Ireland," we 
 shall find an important person known as the Flaith, who is 
 permanently connected with a definite territory upon which 
 are settled — 
 
 (a) His Ciniud, or agnatic kinsmen, grouped together in 
 
 an apparently artificial way, known as Fine; 
 {b) His Ceile, or, as we should call them, tenants, who, 
 though tribesmen, have accepted stock from him 
 in manner before described ; 
 {c) His Fuidhir, or strangers, who, apparently, have 
 become his peculiar charge, either by some kind 
 of distribution within the tribe, or by voluntary 
 arrangement. 
 Apparently, in order to attain this position of Flaith, or 
 landlord, the ordinary Boaire, or rich cattle-owner, must 
 have held his position for three generations. The third in 
 descent from the Boaire, if he is still rich and has main- 
 tained his position on the same land, becomes a Flaith. 
 But how did he come to be settled permanently on 
 this land? 
 
 No subdivisions of land in the pastoral pepiod.— 
 It is fairly clear that, during the purely pastoral epoch, there 
 were no permanent divisions of the land within the tribe. 
 Each man's share of the tribal land was reckoned, not in 
 acres or other land measurement, but vcC cattle and sheep. It 
 was, obviously, much easier to reckon this way than to go to 
 the trouble of measuring out the land and allotting a portion 
 to each man. The cattle wandered about, according to the 
 season of the year, followed by the tribesmen with their tents 
 and scanty goods ; and it is probable that this is all that a 
 good deal of the so-called nomadism amounted to. But now 
 we have to suppose the practice of agriculture slowly
 
 58 A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 adopted, "because of the abundance of the households.'* 
 Gradually this wandering existence became more and more 
 impossible. Granted that, at first, the cultivators of the 
 soil cleared and broke up any part of the forest land not 
 actually occupied by their fellow-tribesmen, sooner or 
 later the improvements in agriculture described at the 
 beginning of this chapter rendered people unwilling to 
 abandon their land. But who were the earliest cultivators 
 of the soil? Obviously, the strangers attached to the tribe, 
 upon whom the rough work of the community fell, and who 
 would be the first to suffer from scarcity of food. Gradually 
 the tribal territory thus got broken up among the rich tribes- 
 men, each with his Ceile or dependents and his Fuidhir or 
 strangers ; and, after three generations of holding, he could 
 not be dispossessed. This view is strikingly suggested for 
 Ireland by the famous poem of Finntann on the battle of 
 Magh Lena. He tells us that of old Ireland was divided 
 into one hundred and eighty-four Tricha Ceds, i. e., tribal 
 territories, that each of them was subdivided into thirty 
 Ballys, or clan lands, each maintaining three hundred cattle, 
 and having twelve seisrighs, or ploughlands, each of one 
 hundred and twenty acres. We are not bound to suppose 
 that the poet was entirely accurate in his figures ; but he 
 was not likely to have made a glaring misstatement of ob- 
 vious facts. We may accept his general description as true, 
 the more so as it is substantially supported by the evidence 
 of the Welsh Laws. 
 
 The Welsh evidence. — For, in the Welsh Laws, we 
 have not only the kin^ or tribe, settled in its cantred, but we 
 have a subdivision known as the gwely, under a breyr, or 
 uchelwr, who is a sort of minor patriarch, at the head of a 
 living family of three generations. The term gwely, which 
 literally means a bed or couch, is strongly suggestive of 
 family ties ; and, as a matter of fact, we have in the Welsh 
 Laws a very interesting description of the ancient Welsh 
 patriarchal house, which seems to have been much of the
 
 AGRICULTURE AND THE CLAN 59 
 
 same type as the ordinary Gothic church. Behind the 
 pillars (gavels) which supported the roof and formed the 
 nave, were what we should call, in modem architecture, the 
 "transepts," but which the Laws call the gwelys, or 
 couches ; and the Tir Gwelyawg, or ancestral land, is, like 
 the Irish Orba, the land of a family which has remained in 
 possession of the same district for three generations, and 
 has tenants and serfs under it. In the Welsh evidence, 
 too, it is also worth noting that, primarily, the agriculture 
 is supposed to be done by the Alltuds, or strangers ; the 
 free tribesmen occupying themselves principally with cattle- 
 rearing. 
 
 The Scottish evidence. — Lastly, in the Scottish evi- 
 dence, especially that part of it which relates to the High- 
 lands, we find the clan, or section of the tribe, permanently 
 settled as a land-occupying unit engaged in agriculture. 
 Thus, even after the feudalizing process, which began in the 
 fourteenth century, had made some little way, the davoch is 
 found to consist normally of four parts ; viz., the thaneston, 
 or lord's demesne, the tenandries, or holdings of the 
 superior class, significantly known as "kindly tenants," 
 usually on very profitable terms, the steelbow lands, occu- 
 pied (usually in holdings of two oxgangs, or a husbandland 
 of about twenty -six acres), by small farmers who receive 
 their stock from the thane, or lord, and the servile lands, 
 occupied in small patches by cottagers who spend most of 
 their time in working on the lord's demesne. This looks 
 extremely like the Orba of the Irish Laws, and the Tir 
 Gwelyawg of Wales. 
 
 Kinship in the village.— Thus, we have seen, if our 
 account be correct, that those writers who contend for the 
 origin of the village in a group of kinsmeji, have a good 
 deal of truth on their side. And their contention is in- 
 directly supported by many significant, if indirect, survivals. 
 One of these is the widespread practice oi fosterage in early 
 agricultural society, i. e. , the practice of the richer members
 
 6o A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 of the community putting out their children to be brought 
 up by the poorer. As is well known, fosterage ties were 
 looked upon in early times as almost equivalent to kinship ; 
 and it would seem that by this practice the community 
 wished at least to pretend that all its members were of kin. 
 Then, too, there is the equally widespread practice of the 
 "maiden fee" {Merchet, as the Saxons called it ; Amobyr, as 
 it was known to the Welsh). This consisted of a payment 
 made to the chief or lord on marriage of a villager's 
 daughter, and represents, no doubt, the ancient "bride- 
 price" received by the wife's kindred. Finally, expressions 
 such as the "brotherhood," to signify the village in certain 
 parts of India, and the known unwillingness in primitive 
 countries at the present day to permit a stranger to acquire 
 lands in a villae:e, all point to the same conclusion. 
 
 Lor-dship in the village.— On the other hand, the 
 writers who assert the origin of the village to be in lordship 
 rather than in kinship have much on their side. To say 
 nothing of the important part which, as we have seen, was 
 played by the subject stranger in the clan, we must not 
 forget that, wherever we find primitive agricultural society, 
 we always find something in the nature of dues or rents paid 
 by tlie farmer. Even if we put aside such obviously later 
 introductions as the Danegelt in England, and the KJiiraj 
 of the Mahommedan conquests, about which we must speak 
 at a later stage, we have still the food-retits and /castings 
 (see p. 34) due from the receiver of stock to his lord, and 
 from the latter to his chief ; while from all lands something 
 in the nature of tribute is paid to the tribal chief The 
 latter also, as well as the heads of clans, has his special 
 allotment of land for his support, and this he frequently 
 loans out to people who pay him part of the produce in 
 return, just as, in the earlier pastoral days, the rich cattle- 
 owner took food-rents and feastings from his Ceile, or 
 receivers of stock. Once more, there can be little doubt 
 that, whilst land was still plentiful, any enterprising clansman
 
 AGRICULTURE AND THE CLAN 6l 
 
 might colonize the waste lands of the clan, and found a new 
 village with a band of followers whom he collected round 
 him ; and in such a case he would, doubtless, become the 
 lord of the new village. 
 
 The fact is, that in kinship and lordship we have two 
 very early and very powerful principles of association. The 
 former appeals more to sentiment, and tends to produce 
 harmony ; the latter is founded upon respect for superior 
 strength and masterful qualities, and tends to produce 
 obedience. Both harmony and obedience are essential to 
 the successful ordering of a social unit, such as the agricul- 
 tural village.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 Industry and the Gild 
 
 Metal-WOPking. — By a somewhat unfair use of the 
 term, the word "industry" is usually appHed only to pur- 
 suits other than hunting, cattle-tending and agriculture. In 
 a sense, therefore, there is "industry" even in the savage 
 epoch, when the women of the pack skin and dress the 
 captured animals in the cave or bark hut ; still more so in 
 the pastoral epoch, when the wife and the daughters of the 
 shepherd weave the wool of the flocks into garments, and 
 make the milk of the herds into butter and cheese. But the 
 great spur to industry comes with the development of agri- 
 culture, when there is a demand for ploughshares, reaping- 
 hooks, spades, mattocks and hoes ; and this is itself con- 
 nected with one of the most important subjects m the 
 history of civilization : the art of working in metals. The 
 primitive implements of husbandry are, no doubt, made of 
 wood and stone ; but no great progress in agriculture can 
 be made until metal tools are employed. 
 
 Use of iron. — Now it is tolerably clear that even 
 pastoral races have some knowledge of working in metals. 
 The brazen helmets and corselets of the Homeric heroes, 
 their swords and spears, the uncoined money (reckoned by 
 weight) of the Jewish patriarchs, the gold and silver orna- 
 ments of the African tribes, and the numerous bronze relics 
 of great antiquity constantly dug up, all point to the fact 
 that the art of working in metals is very ancient. But it is 
 to be noticed that all these are soft metals, which can be 
 
 C62)
 
 INDUSTRY AND THE GILD 63 
 
 worked with the stone hammer, and beaten out, whilst cold, 
 into the required shape. The real revolution comes when 
 men learn to work in iron^ which can only be molded by 
 being smelted in the fire, but which, when so worked, is 
 infinitely harder than the older metals, and can produce 
 results which they could never have produced. 
 
 There is a good deal of ground for conjecturing that 
 this important art of smelting metals did not originate in 
 Europe, but was imported from the East, possibly from 
 Egypt, where iron was worked in very early times. A 
 brilliant German writer, who has endeavoured to draw a 
 picture of primitive Aryan society from the evidence of 
 language, has pointed out that there is no general or widely- 
 spread word for "iron" among the Aryan-speaking races. 
 And from this fact he draws the conclusion that the knowl- 
 edge of iron was acquired by the European nations after 
 their migration into western Europe. Be this as it may, 
 it is quite certain that the European races have long ago 
 surpassed all the rest of the world in the art of working 
 in iron. 
 
 The smith. — It is evident, then, that industry (in the 
 modern sense of the term) begins with the important craft 
 of the smith, from which, indeed, almost all other crafts 
 may be said to have sprung. The smith it was who forged 
 and mended the ploughshares and reaping-hooks of the vil- 
 lage, and, still more important, its swords and spears. He 
 it was who, as later improvements came, made the iron 
 nails which took the place of the old bone and wooden 
 skewers, and the metal knives which superseded the old 
 stone axes and sharp flints, who substituted the iron ham- 
 mer for the rude lump of quartz with a shaft stuck through 
 it. If any one with the necessary knowledge and patience 
 would write a history of the craft of the smith, tracing its 
 development in all ages and in all countries, he would do 
 yeoman service to the cause of social history. What little 
 is known is very significent. For example, it seems toler-
 
 64 A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 ably clear that for many ages in Europe the craft was in the 
 hands of travelling stranglers, perhaps the ancestors oi 
 our modern (gypsies, who jealously guarded their valuable 
 secrets and made no end of mystery of their calling. The 
 many legends which have grown up round the calling of the 
 smith (of which the Wayland Smith episode in Scott's 
 Kcnilworth is a skilful adaptation) are fertile matter for a 
 thorough investigation. The gypsy idea is, of course, quite 
 in accordance with the suggestion, that the art of smelting 
 iron was brought into Europe by strangers. 
 
 Specialization of industry.— But, as might have been 
 expected, the Indo-European peoples, with that capacity for 
 adaptation which has been one of the great secrets of their 
 brilliant success in the world, ultimately acquired the art ; 
 and the numerous families of the Smith name {Schmidt in 
 German, Favre in French, etc.) testify to the popularity of 
 the pursuit. Some other crafts branched off from it; e. g., 
 the carpenter, who worked in wood with the smith's nails, 
 hammer, and chisel ; the cobbler, who borrowed his needle 
 and his knife ; the tailor, who adopted his shears and his 
 needle ; the loriner (or leather worker), the turner, the 
 zvheelwright, the cooper, and so on. Even the older crafts 
 felt the tendency towards specialization, and, instead of 
 each family doing its own weaving, thatching, baking and 
 brewing, we get these crafts undertaken by special bodies, 
 the iveavers, tilers, bakers and brewers* 
 
 Commerce. — But, in remembering the makers or pro- 
 ducers, we must not forget another equally important class 
 of industrial workers; \\z.,\.\\e merchants or exchangers. 
 Indeed, there is some reason to believe that exchange pre- 
 cedes production in the order of ideas. The Australian 
 savages do not make anything worth speaking of, but they 
 exchange certain of their natural advantages for others 
 
 *It is an interesting fact that, in England at least, the earliest pro- 
 fessional brewers (or should we say breweresses ?} were Women.
 
 INDUSTRY AND THE GILD 6$ 
 
 which they need. Thus, a pack which hunts a country 
 abounding in a peculiar green stone, greatly valued for the 
 purpose of stone axes, will send some of its young men with 
 lumps of the precious articles, to exchange against the 
 feathers of certain birds collected by another tribe, which 
 are greatly valued for decorative purposes. These primi- 
 tive merchants observe certain formalities in their approach 
 to the stranger camp ; and are, by immemorial custom, 
 entitled to be treated as guests, not as etiemies. The 
 custom of making presents on approaching an African 
 chief as a stranger is said to be a survival of this ancient 
 practice ; for, it is to be noted, the chief always observes the 
 etiquette of offering return gifts. At any rate, we get here 
 the earliest appearances of the law of the market^ which is 
 again a notable factor in the history of civilization. 
 
 Barter and sale. — Trade is, of course, for long ages 
 conducted in its primitive form by means of barter, i. e., the 
 exchange of one article against another. The disadvantages 
 of such a form are obvious. One tribe or clan may have 
 plenty of ostrich feathers, for example, to dispose of, but 
 may not require the only articles which another has to offer. 
 It is clear that no business can be done between them. 
 Inside a community the matter could be adjusted by a sort 
 of debtor and creditor account ; but between stranger, pos- 
 sibly rival communities, such a course would not be pos- 
 sible. Occasionally some toketi, such as the African 
 cowry shell, is adopted as a stajidard of value, in which 
 payments can be made. But the objection to this course is 
 that these articles are not really in themselves valuable, and 
 may, therefore, involve the community which takes them 
 in a loss. A great advance is made when some article of 
 universal demand, such as the ox, is adopted as a 
 standard of value. We then get the difference between 
 barter and sale. The community which requires the ostrich 
 feathers, but which has no article specially required by the 
 other community to dispose of, pays so many oxen in
 
 66 A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 exchange for the feathers. The oxen are thus the price, 
 which, as economists tells us, is value expressed i?i lertns 
 of money. A curious testimony to the truth of this 
 account is found in the fact that, when oxen are super- 
 seded as money by the precious metals, which, as being 
 more portable and less easily subject to depreciation, are 
 really more suitable, the earliest coins are often found to 
 be stamped with an ox^s head. But we must not suppose 
 that coined money at once takes the place of oxen. There 
 is an intermediate stage of uncoined money, which passes 
 by weight. Abundant evidence of this fact survives ; but 
 we need not look farther than our own word pound, which 
 may mean either a weight or a coin of a particular value. 
 
 Organization of industry.— Having now seen some- 
 thing of the way in which industry, in its two branches of 
 production and exchange, arose, we turn, in dealing with 
 agriculture, to examine how industry was organized, i. e., 
 what institutiojis were developed to work it. 
 
 Village CPaftsmen.— There can be little doubt that, at 
 first, there was an attempt to fit industry into the village 
 system. Although the smith, as a stranger, would not 
 readily be absorbed in a group of kinsmen, although, as a 
 matter of fact, we generally find the smithy at a little 
 distance from the village, yet the "village blacksmith" 
 became, and, indeed, still is, a recognized village institution. 
 So also with the other early crafts. The carpenter, cobbler 
 and tailor, the weaver, tiler and baker, are in Oriental 
 countries at the present day, and formerly in European 
 countries were, integral parts of the village system. As for 
 the primitive merchant, we find him in the humble guise of 
 the pedlar, or huckster, going about with his pack from 
 village to village, and so being, if not a villager, at least a 
 connecting link between villages. 
 
 The market. — But, as industry became more and more 
 specialized, as new crafts developed out of the old, it 
 gradually became clear that more rapid progress was made
 
 INDUSTRY AND THE GILD 67 
 
 and better work done if the workers in a particular craft 
 collected together in a centre, perhaps specially suited for 
 the particular industry; and thus we get the beginning of 
 that tendency for industry to gravitate towards towns, which 
 is so marked a feature of modern industrial life. It may be 
 that the gradual collection of craftsmen formed the town, or 
 it may be that the existence of a fortified town attracted the 
 craftsmen. That is a much-disputed question. But it is 
 tolerably certain that one of the earliest institutions in con- 
 nection with towns was the tnarket, and that the existence 
 of the market was closely connected with the development 
 of industry. The neighboring villages would not want to 
 come to market for agricultural produce ; but they would 
 want to come for the produce of what is specially known as 
 "industry." 
 
 Now, the very essence of the market is that it is neutral 
 growtd, on which the members of different communities can 
 meet without trespassing on one another's territories. As its 
 name implies, it was frequently on the tnarch or boundary of 
 two or more districts. And, whether it was so or not in any 
 particular instance, it was essential that it should be a place 
 of peace. The existence of the market cross in later days 
 shows that the Church took the market under her special 
 protection. And, also later, kings and emperors made a 
 special point of protecting the peace of their markets. How 
 the peace was guarded in the ancient days before Church 
 and State, it is difficult to say. In savage times the essential 
 point is that seller and buyer shall never actually come into 
 contact. The seller brings his article near the strange 
 camp, lays it down on the ground in full view, and retires. 
 The intending purchaser comes out, inspects the article, 
 places beside it what he is willing to give in exchange, and 
 also retires. The seller once more comes up, inspects the 
 proffered exchange, and, if satisfied, takes it away, leaving 
 his own article to be fetched by the purchaser. If he is 
 dissatisfied with the offer, he takes his own article away.
 
 68 A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 Needless to observe, savage barter is a trifle tedious ; but 
 time is of no value to savages, who, indeed, do not under- 
 stand what it means. In patriarchal times, the "gods of the 
 market place" probably are supposed, in some mysterious 
 way, to guard the peace of the market. At any rate, the 
 bazaar, which is the Oriental market, is a typical feature of 
 town life in patriarchal countries at the present day. 
 
 The gild.— But it is totally contrary to the ideas of 
 primitive man to live as an individual, isolated and unpro- 
 tected, in a large society. We have seen that pastoral 
 pursuits developed the tribe, with its strong blood bond, its 
 mutual protection of its members by the blood feud and its 
 ancestor worship. We have seen, too, that agriculture led 
 to the existence of the clan, with its strongly organized 
 family system, its elaborate arrangements of land occupation, 
 and its reciprocal duties of protection and service between 
 chief and followers. Just in the same way, the appearance 
 of industrial pursuits produced the gild. The craftsman, 
 finding himself in a strange place, cut off from his own 
 kindred, formed with his fellows an association resembling 
 as closely as possible the association of kindred which he 
 had left behind him. Perhaps at first it was merely a peace- 
 association, a. frith-gild, as the Saxons called it ; then it took 
 on a religious character, doubtless in imitation of the old 
 ancestor worship of the clan. The medieval gild always 
 had its patron saint ; and, if its members did not really 
 believe themselves to be descended from their patron saint, 
 they often spoke as if they did. Finally, the gild became 
 more industrial in character ; busying itself more and more 
 with such matters as the regulation of work and prices, the 
 inspection of workshops, the fixing of measures and qualities, 
 the exclusion of strangers, and so on. But the more we 
 study the gild, the more we see its likeness to the old clan. 
 Like the clan, it was strongly hereditary. The best title to 
 admission to the full privileges of a gild was the fact that 
 the applicant's father was, or had been, a member. Failing
 
 INDUSTRY AND THE GILD 69 
 
 birth, apprenticeship was the only alternative. But appren- 
 ticeship is very like adoption. In the days of gilds, the 
 apprentice lived in his master's house, fed at his master's 
 table, shared in his worship, was clothed and taught by him, 
 just like a son. Just as the member of a clan took the name 
 of the founder, and put before it or after it some sound 
 which indicated "son of," so the member of the gild called 
 himself by the name of his craft. While the clansman 
 called himself " i'J^.rDougall," or "Bill/«^," or ap Tudor," 
 or "^i?«hadad," the craftsman called himself "Smith," 
 "Turner," "Carpenter," and so on. In fact, it is said by 
 some competent observers that the Indian caste system is 
 merely an elaboration of hereditary craft-gilds. Moreover, 
 the gild in later days provided schools and orphanages for 
 the children of its members, attended their funerals, pro- 
 vided masses for their souls, spoke of its members as 
 "brethren," had an "elder man" {Ealdorman) for chief, 
 settled disputes amongst its members, and forbade its 
 members to compete with one another, just as a well- 
 conducted association of kinsmen would do. Finally, on its 
 strongly developed social side, in its frequent drinkings, 
 feastings and merrymakings, the medieval gild strongly 
 resembled a great family group. 
 
 Thus we have seen that patriarchal society had succeeded, 
 more or less completely, in making provision in its own way 
 for the needs of advancing civilization. As each new de- 
 velopment of human ingenuity brought a new occupation to 
 light, patriarchal society was equal to the task of organizing 
 itself to receive and carry it on. Obviously, patriarchal 
 society rested on principles which are, or were, very deep 
 in human nature, very capable of making themselves felt 
 under all sorts of circumstances. Once more, as we are 
 leaving the subject, it will be well to summarize briefly the 
 distinctive features in which patriarchal society differed from 
 modern or political society, the consideration of which lies
 
 70 A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 immediately before us. We cannot too clearly realize the 
 contrast ; the more clearly we realize it the more shall we 
 really understand modern conditions. 
 
 1. PeFSOnal basis. — Now-a-days we regard /^rrj/cry or 
 locality as the great basis of society. But, as we have seen, 
 despite the fact that nomadism or wandering life practically 
 ceased with the adoption of agriculture, patriarchal society 
 always considered itself as a body constituted by race, not 
 by territory. Even the gild, as we have seen, regarded 
 itself as a brotherhood, not as a mere neighbourhood. 
 Though, doubtless, the members of a particular gild often 
 lived near to one another in the same town, they lived 
 together because they were members of the gild ; they were 
 not members of the gild because they lived near together. 
 Still more obviously are the clatt and the tribe personal, not 
 territorial associations. 
 
 2. ExelUSiveness.— This feature of patriarchal society 
 is a natural result of the former. Normally speaking, the 
 only means of obtaining membership of a race is by being 
 born into that race. Patriarchal society went so far as to 
 admit the case oi adoption, or fictitious birth, under carefully 
 guarded rules. But it would have recoiled in horror from 
 the casual hospitality which a modern State extends to all 
 tolerable immigrants. Modern States believe in large num- 
 bers ; patriarchal communities do not. Some people are 
 inclined to think that patriarcal society was right. It is a 
 question of whether it is preferable to maintain purity of 
 race and be extinguished as an independent community, or 
 to admit alien blood and prosper. The history of the world 
 shows that these are the inevitable alternatives. Racial 
 exclusiveness wrecked the so-called "City State" of the 
 Greeks ; it very nearly wrecked the budding destinies of 
 Rome. All the world over the rule applies ; the pure- 
 blooded races are weak, the mixed races are strong. 
 
 3. Fixity of Custom.— Custom plays, as we shall see, a 
 large part in modern life ; but modern custom is continually
 
 INDUSTRY AND THE GILD 7T 
 
 being modified and changed. The custom of patriarchal 
 society is rigid. No doubt it changes a Httle ; but a society 
 whose chief moral duty is to continue the traditions of its 
 ancestors is hardly likely to admit novelty if it can help it. 
 Sir Henry Maine tells a delightful story of an Indian village 
 which had had a water supply provided for it by a paternal 
 British Government. The villagers were notified, as a matter 
 of course, of the official regulations laid down for the proper 
 use of the water. An East End district of London would 
 be only too glad to get a good water supply on such terms. 
 But to the patriarchal society of India the notion that cus- 
 toms could be manufactured by an official pen was simply 
 incredible. And it was not until a wise official induced the 
 village elders (by what means is not stated) to persuade the 
 rank and file that the rules in question were really of 
 immemorial antiquity, though their existence had only just 
 been discovered, that the difficulty was solved. Even the 
 gild prided itself on the antiquity of its statutes, though the 
 gild is, of course, the most modern form of patriarchal 
 society. The caste system of India is the extreme outcome 
 of the rigidity of patriarchal custom. When we speak of 
 the "unchanging East," we allude to countries which are 
 still in the grip of patriarchal principles. 
 
 As a consequence of its unchanging character, patriarchal 
 society is also, to a great extent, non- competitive. Competition 
 involves innovation at every turn ; the successful competitor 
 usually succeeds because he does things in a superior way of 
 his own. Doubtless it is also possible to succeed by doing 
 things in the same way as one's rivals, but doing them better. 
 And to this extent, presumably, patriarchal society is com- 
 petitive. But the trade offences known as " engrossing " and 
 "forestalling," which are recognized in quite the last stage of 
 patriarchal society, are amusing illustrations of the limited 
 extent to which that society allowed competition. "Fore- 
 stalling" merely means buying earlier than your neighbours, 
 in order to control the supply of commodities and get
 
 72 A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 better prices. As its name implies, it is an attempt to buy 
 goods before they reach the market. "Engrossing" is 
 simply dealing in a large number of articles, instead of 
 observing the customary restrictions, in order to be able to 
 sell cheap, and so attract custom. It is pathetic to think 
 that the harmless and indeed useful "grocer" of modern 
 times is, in origin, a member of a criminal class. 
 
 4. Communalism.— Observe, we do not say Com- 
 fnunisnt. Patriarchal society is not communistic, \. e., it does 
 not refuse to recognize individual rights, nor does it pool the 
 productions of its members and divide them equally. But 
 it is communal, in the sense that it is always organized in 
 groups. The smallest group of which it takes direct notice 
 is the household, which is probably very much larger than 
 our modern household, and may contain two or three gen- 
 erations, with wives, apprentices and serfs. Within that 
 household the higher authority does not penetrate. The 
 same rule is observed in an ascending scale. What the 
 household is to the clan or gild that the clan is to the tribe. 
 With us, the supreme authority can control directly the 
 actions of any individual. The reason for that change will 
 shortly appear. But in patriarchal society the tribal chief, 
 after the break-up of the tribe into clans, communicates 
 directly with the clan chiefs only, except that he probably 
 has a clan of his own of which he is tribal head as well as 
 clan chief. The clan chief, likewise, communicates only 
 with the heads of households within his clan ; to the heads 
 of households belongs the control over the dwellers within 
 their walls. But we really err in comparing the position of 
 any patriarchal authority with that of a modern State official. 
 The latter is wielding the power of a despotic ruler, whether 
 that ruler be an individual or a parliament. The former is 
 merely administering the customs of his race.
 
 Type III — Modern (Political) Society 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 The State and Feudalism 
 
 The origin of the State, or Political Society, is to be 
 found in the development of the art of warfare. It may 
 be very sad that this should be so ; but it is unquestion- 
 ably true. Historically speaking, there is not the slightest 
 difficulty in proving that all political communities of the 
 modern type owe their existence to successful warfare. As 
 a natural consequence, they are forced to be organized on 
 military principles, tempered, doubtless, by a survival of 
 older (patriarchal) ideas. Happily, there is a good side, as 
 well as a bad one, to military life. 
 
 Development of wapfare.— The question may natur- 
 ally be asked at this stage — How came military principles 
 to receive such a startling development after society had, 
 apparently, succeeded in organizing itself on more peaceful 
 lines ? Fighting there had always been, of course ; wars 
 between tribe and tribe, clan and clan, even between 
 village and village, town and town. But this was more in 
 the nature of a feud, a sort of standing quarrel which 
 broke out again and again, and then slumbered for a 
 while ; it was nothing like the organized and determined 
 warfare which resulted in the formation of States. It may 
 be described as amateur rather than professional fighting. 
 
 Inepsase of population.— Although we cannot speak 
 with certainty as to the causes of this development, it is 
 
 (73)
 
 74 A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 not difficult to suggest one or two facts which may have 
 led to it. First and foremost comes the increase of popu- 
 lation^ with its consequent pressure on the means of sub- 
 sistence. This increase is always, under normal circum- 
 stances, steadily going on ; and it is dealt with in various 
 ways. Sometimes a pestilence breaks out ; and the super- 
 abundant population, enfeebled by short allowance of food, 
 is swept away by disease. Sometimes wholesale migra- 
 tions take place to less thickly populated districts ; this 
 may be regarded as a real remedy, though perhaps only a 
 temporary one, for the trouble. Sometimes, again, a great 
 new invention enables a largely increased food supply to be 
 produced ; the changes from hunting life to pastoral life, 
 and again from pastoral life to agriculture, are examples. 
 Finally, war may break out on a large scale ; and the 
 weaker peoples may be either exterminated or (more 
 probably) reduced to subjection by the stronger. 
 
 Increase of wealth. — Another cause may have been 
 the great increase of realized wealth attendant upon suc- 
 cessful agriculture, and, still more, industry. Pastoral 
 wealth has this advantage, that it can be moved about 
 with tolerable ease. A weak tribe can fold up its tents, 
 and drive its cattle and sheep out of harm's way. But 
 the wealth of the husbandman cannot be so disposed of. 
 His wealth is in his fields, which he has patiently culti- 
 vated, and in his bams and presses which he has filled 
 with corn and wine. He has built himself a permanent 
 house, and he will not leave it while a chance of safety, or 
 even of existence, remains. He is a very tempting bait to 
 the military adventurer. Still more is the craftsman, with 
 his rich store of wealth, a tempting object of plunder. 
 The sack of an industrial town, with its shops and its 
 stores of goods, is the dream of the freebooter. Wass 
 fiir Plunder! was Bliicher's exclamation when he was 
 shown London from the dome of St. Paul's. It was the old 
 instinct of the professional soldier.
 
 THE STATE AND FEUDALISM 75 
 
 ImpPOveraent in weapons.— Once more, it is natural 
 to suppose that the improvement in the art of working in 
 metals did much to stimulate the military spirit. The 
 superiority of iron, still more of steel weapons and armour, 
 over the old wooden bows and arrows and leather shield 
 and corselet, would give a natural impetus to warfare. 
 Above all, with the tendency towards specialization which, 
 as we have seen, is one of the master principles of develop- 
 ment, this improvement in the means of warfare would 
 tend to produce a special military class, the professional 
 warrior of the modern world. In primitive times every 
 man was a soldier ; as civilization progressed, the bulk 
 of people became interested in other things, and fighting 
 became the work of specialists. This fact is directly con- 
 nected with the origin of the State. 
 
 The German wap-bands.— In the interesting account 
 given by Tacitus of our Teutonic forefathers in their ances- 
 tral homes, we notice one very significant feature. Not 
 only does the historian distinguish between the princeps, 
 or tribal chief, who was chosen for his noble birth, and the 
 dux, or war leader, who was chosen for his valour ; he 
 shows us the latter surrounded by a band of adventurous 
 companions, who took no part in the ordinary pastoral 
 life of the tribe, but were constantly engaged in warfare, 
 either in defense of their own tribe or in plundering expe- 
 ditions against strange tribes. These "companions," as 
 they are called, were fed at the leader's table, were 
 furnished with food and garments by the women of his 
 household, and shared the booty of their leader's expedi- 
 tions. The devoted loyalty which they displayed towanis 
 their leader is described in a spirited and well-known pas- 
 sage. They counted it a disgrace to leave the field alive 
 if he was dead ; their dead bodies were found thickly 
 piled around his in the disastrous day of defeat. It is 
 probable that, at first, this band of companions was com- 
 posed mainly of the kinsmen of the leader, his gesiths, aa
 
 76 A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 the Saxons called them ; but ultimately they became simply 
 volunteers who joined the band from love of adventure 
 and a military life. They were the thanes (or servants) of 
 the heretoch (or host-leader.) 
 
 Foundation of states.— A Stale is founded when one 
 of these host-leaders with his band of warriors gets perma- 
 nent control of a definite territory of a considerable size. 
 And, practically speaking, this always occurs in one of two 
 ways. 
 
 Consolidation. — The host-leader, after firmly estab- 
 lishing his position as ruler of his own tribe, extends his 
 authority over neighbouring tribes, until he becomes ruler 
 of a large territory. This is what seems to have happened 
 in the England of the ninth century, when the so-called 
 "tribal kingdoms" of the Heptarchy, after fluctuating for 
 many years between the Bretwaldaship of the various 
 tribal chiefs, became more or less consolidated by conquest 
 in the time of Egbert. The same movement showed itself 
 also in the neighbouring country of Scandinavia, where, 
 also in the ninth century, the innumerable tribes became 
 gradually consolidated, as the result of hard fighting, into 
 the three historic kingdoms of Norway, Denmark and 
 Sweden, under Harold Fairhair, Gorm the Old, and Eric 
 of Upsala, who, as the Heimskringla strikingly puts it, 
 subdued all rival chiefs "with scatt (taxes), and duties, 
 and lordships." Much the same appears also to have been 
 done in the gradual consolidation of the Celtic tribes of 
 Scotland under the line of Malcolm Canmore, and of the 
 tribes of Wales under the hereditary Princes who were 
 found to be ruling the country at the Norman Conquest. 
 In Ireland the trouble was that no successful warrior 
 succeeded in making permanent a powerful dynasty. And, 
 in central Europe, the too ambitious efforts of the Prankish 
 warriors, Clovis and his successors, though brilliantly suc- 
 cessful at first, resulted finally in a similar period of 
 anarchy, which is known by the expressive name of the
 
 THE STATE AND FEUDALISM 77 
 
 "Dark Ages." In fact, the State formed by consolidation 
 is always rather liable to break up into its former elements. 
 
 MigPation. — Or a State is founded by the successful 
 migration and conquest by a band of warriors to and of a 
 strange country. This was the history, in very early times, 
 of the foundation of the kingdom of Lombardy (a Teutonic 
 conquest of a Latin land) ; likewise of the Visigothic king- 
 dom of Spain. Somewhat later it was the brilliant history 
 of the Normans or Northmen, who, in the ninth century, 
 became the ruling power in Russia ; in the tenth founded 
 the practically independent Dutchy of Normandy ; in the 
 eleventh the new kingdom of England ; in the twelfth the 
 kingdom of the Sicilies, and the short-lived kingdom of 
 Jerusalem. 
 
 Charaetep of the State. — The new type of community 
 formed by these events differed fundamentally from that 
 which preceded it. In the first place, it was essentially 
 territorial in character. Though its rulers for some time 
 continued to call themselves by tribal names ("Kings of 
 the English," " Kings of the French," and so on), in 
 reality the limits of their authority were the limits of their 
 territories. Whosoever lived, nay, whosoever happened to 
 be, within their dominions, was their subject, their subditus, 
 or subdued man, bound to obey their commands, and 
 especially bound to obey their call to arms. The life of 
 the new community was military allegiance, that faithful 
 obedience to the orders of a commander which had enabled 
 the conqueror, with the aid of his devoted followers, to 
 place his foot on the necks of the conquered tribes. Race 
 feeling, no doubt, long counted for much ; no prudent 
 ruler could afford to neglect it. But it was no longer the 
 essential bond of unity. To begin with, the ruler and his 
 chief followers were probably of different blood, perhaps 
 even of different religion and speech, from the mass of the 
 subject population. Apart from this fact, the successful 
 warrior, knowing the value of numbers, was always trying
 
 78 A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 to import new followers, about whose race he cared little, 
 provided only that they could be relied on to do good 
 service, either with the sword or the pen. Finally, being 
 generally a man of superior enlightenment, the new ruler 
 was often anxious to throw open the country to foreign 
 adventurers, whether merchants, ecclesiastics or teachers, 
 believing that his fame and wealth would thereby be 
 increased. This policy was, as is well known, the cause 
 of much trouble in the early days of the State ; but the 
 new spirit ultimately got its way. 
 
 New type of religion.— Again, the exclusiveness of 
 the old tribal systems was rudely broken down. It had 
 rested mainly, as we have seen, towards the end of its 
 history, on the system of ancestor worship. But the estab- 
 lishment of the western State was curiously coincident with 
 the triumph of a new type of religion, the chief character- 
 istic of which was universality. It may sound, at first 
 hearing, ridiculous to associate the meek religion of Christ 
 with the aggressive military institution of the State. Yet 
 it is quite certain that Christianity had a great deal to do 
 with breaking down tribal prejudice, and with the estab- 
 lishment of great political communities. To take the first 
 and most glaring example which presents itself: The con- 
 version of Clovis to Christianity was intimately connected 
 with the formation of the brilliant, if short-lived, Prankish 
 empire. The heathen Burgundians and Saxons were over- 
 come by the Christian Franks. In the name of Christianity, 
 Charles the Great rolled back the tide of Saracen invasion 
 from the Pyrenees, and established the frontiers of Chris- 
 tendom. Though Christianity in its earliest days had 
 been a mission to the poor and lowly, its great conquests 
 in northern and western Europe were due to the conver- 
 sion of kings and princes. The conversion of ^thelbirht 
 of Kent was the signal for the conversion of England. 
 Christianity passed from Court to Court of the Heptarchic 
 kingdoms. And Christianity well repaid the favour of
 
 THE STATE AND FEUDALISM 79 
 
 princes. Under the cry of "one church and one king," 
 the older tribal divisions were ultimately wiped out, and 
 England became one nation ; with Church and State in 
 intimate alliance. Even more obviously had Mahom- 
 medanism the result of breaking down tribal divisions, and 
 establishing mighty kingdoms, like the kingdom of Akbar 
 in India, the kingdom of Ismail in Persia, and the kingdom 
 of Mahomet at Constantinople. 
 
 The new nobility.— Once more, the new political 
 organism, the State, no longer regarded custofn as its guid- 
 ing star. By its very nature militarism is competitive ; for 
 competition means strife, and strife is of the very essence of 
 war. Mimic warfare may be conducted according to fixed 
 tradition ; but, in that case, it is rather sport than war. Real 
 war is a death-struggle, and each combatant will strain every 
 nerve to gain the advantage. If any one will show him a 
 new dodge for defeating his enemy, he will take it and be 
 thankful. He will not ask if it is consecrated by the wisdom 
 of his ancestors. Even the very modern humanitarian spirit 
 has only succeeded in making slight inroads upon the fierce 
 competition of war ; and if it succeeds in making further or 
 serious inroads, it will destroy war, or reduce it to the level 
 of a sport, which is, of course, its object. The founders of 
 the State were, as we have seen, all successful warriors, who 
 had won success by new combinations, new methods, daring 
 disregard of tradition. It was hardly probable that, under 
 their regime, the old traditional, customary life would be 
 continued. Their watchword was ability, not custom. If 
 they saw a man who could fight well, or write well, or sing 
 well, they called him to their courts, regardless of his race 
 or social rank. They knew that their position was pre- 
 carious ; they could not afford to leave any stone unturned 
 to ensure their safety. And one of their surest measures 
 was to surround themselves with the ablest men on whom 
 they could lay their hands. All over Europe the break-up 
 of patriarchal society is marked by a striking change in the
 
 8o A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 idea of nobility. The old nobility of birth, and zvealth, the 
 members of the sacred families of the tribe and clan, the 
 great lords of cattle, are replaced by the royal nobility, whose 
 hall mark is the choice of the king. In the Barbarian Codes 
 which tell us so much of early Teutonic society, the 
 Atheling, or hereditary noble, is displaced by the antnistion, 
 or royal servant. The latter may even have been at one 
 time a slave ; it is enough that the king has recognized him 
 as a conies, a member of his band of followers. In England 
 the tribal ealdornian, in Scotland the Ri or Mormaer, give 
 way before the Earl or simple thane. Doubtless, in many 
 cases, the change was more apparent than real. Doubtless 
 the tribal chief was willing to accept a title of nobility from 
 the king ; just as the Irish chiefs of the fifteenth century, the 
 O'Donnells and the O'Neills, became the Irish earls of the 
 sixteenth century, the Tyrconnels and the Tyrones. But the 
 difference was none the less significant ; and it paved the 
 way for further change. It marked the triumph of the State 
 over the older patriarchal society- 
 Feudalism. — And, finally, the State was individual, not 
 communal. Again we must be careful not to misunderstand 
 terms. The dream of the despot, who would like to govern 
 every man in his dominions by the immediate action of his 
 caprice, is, happily, never realized. But the tendency of the 
 State, from its very inception, was to break down all inter- 
 mediate barriers between itself and its individual subjects. 
 Every wise ruler is, however, aware that this can only be 
 done by degrees. The warriors who founded successful 
 States, whether they were alien adventurers or enterprising 
 war leaders of neighbouring tribes, found various degrees of 
 authority in existences among their subjects, exercised by 
 men who had been accustomed to deference, if not actually 
 to obedience. These men were rarely dispossessed by the 
 conqueror, unless they persisted in refusing all overtures. 
 The conqueror merely insisted that they should acknowledge 
 their authority to be derived from him. This seemed to be
 
 THE STATE AND FEUDALISM 8l 
 
 such a purely theoretical matter that the transaction was 
 usually attended with little difficulty. Even where the 
 demand of fealty or faithfulness was accompanied by a 
 demand for tribute, there was little practical difficulty ; the 
 conquered chief reckoned with shrewd accuracy on getting 
 the money out of his followers, the humbler members of his 
 tribe or clan. If the conqueror chose to regard the land oc- 
 cupied by his tribe or clan as a gift or trust for the conqueror 
 himself, it did not seem to matter much ; the important point 
 was that the tribe or the clan still kept its land. Where the 
 native chief was irreconcilable, or had been killed in the 
 struggle, the conqueror put one of his own "companions," 
 his comes or thane, into his place ; and thus, of course, 
 obtained a really stronger hold on the conquered territory. 
 Quite naturally, the conqueror's immediate vassals (as we 
 may now begin to call them) found it convenient to repeat 
 the same process with their inferiors. We have seen, in 
 fact, that there were the germs of such a relationship in the 
 practice of cattle lending practiced by patriarchal society 
 (p. 34). But then the adoption of agriculture made land the 
 important factor in society ; and so loans of land became 
 the signs of subordination. Sometimes the transaction was 
 genuine ; as where one man loaned to another land which 
 he was really entitled to keep for himself Very often, 
 however, it was merely fictitious ; as when the inferior 
 yielded up his own land to his superior, and received it 
 back again from him as a loan. The practice, known 
 technically as commendation, was very common in Conti- 
 nental Europe in the Dark Ages, and was primarily due 
 to the fact that, in times of disturbance, the best chance for 
 the weak man is to acknowledge himself the vassal of a 
 strong man, who will protect him. But the tendency 
 spread beyond cattle and land. The customs of a gild, or a 
 number of gilds, their cherished rights of controlling their 
 own members and excluding strangers from the town, came 
 to be held as privileges granted by a ruler ; and so town
 
 82 A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 life was brought within the same idea. Finally, even such 
 a thing as spiritual ofiice (with the emoluments attaching 
 thereto) was held as a gift or loan from a superior ; and so 
 indeed the technical name for such a gift or loan, a benefice, 
 came to be specially associated with spiritual oflice. Thus 
 the whole social organism gradually assumed what we call 
 a feudal aspect, in some respects resembling the old 
 patriarchal organization of groups within groups, but differ- 
 ing from it in the important principle that the rights of 
 the individual were no longer acquired by birthright, by 
 membership of a social group, but were at least deemed 
 to be the grant of a superior, in return for promised service. 
 In the higher ranks, of course, that service was military ; 
 and in this the new system showed its connection with the 
 newer type of society. But in the lower ranks money 
 and labour service were more common. The peasant 
 rendered labour or paid rent to his lord, in return for his 
 land ; the craftsmen of a town paid an annual sum to the 
 king or earl for the charter of their privileges. Even the 
 beneficed clerk owed to his patrofi the duty of saying 
 prayers for the good of his soul. 
 
 Evidence. — We shall see more, as we go on, of the 
 nature and consequences of /^z^o'a/mw. Here it is sufficient 
 to notice its place in the History of Politics. // is the con- 
 necting link between purely patriarchal a?id purely political 
 society. The brilliant historical labours of M. Longnon have, 
 to all intents and purposes, established the geographical 
 identity of the great fiefs of the West Prankish Empire 
 with the tribal settlements of early Gaul. Mr. Skene has 
 been equally successful in showing that the Scottish earl- 
 doms and thanages of the eleventh century were really the 
 old tribal and clan chiefships in a feudal dress. Could we 
 but get sufficient evidence, we should no doubt find that 
 the same was the case in England and other countries. 
 Feudal society has often been reproached with vagueness 
 and inconsistency. These are precisely the qualities whicti
 
 THE STATE AND FEUDALISM 83 
 
 we should expect in a phase of development which is 
 not in itself essential or universal, but which is an easy 
 and convenient means of softening a change. In the 
 popular form of entertainment known as "dissolving 
 views," one picture is not suddenly replaced by another; 
 but the old picture gradually melts into the new by a 
 nebulous and misty process, rather fascinating to watch 
 but not conveying any very clear ideas. In the panorama 
 of History, feudalism represents the blurred outlines and 
 uiotiey colours of the "dissolving view."
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 Early Political Institutions 
 
 Following our accustomed plan, having seen how tbe 
 State came into existence, we proceed to examine its organ- 
 ization, that is to say, the institutions by which its business 
 is carried on. Foremost amongst these institutions stands, 
 of course — 
 
 I. The kingship.— It is a simple historical fact that the 
 kingship of the modern State is the direct outcome of that 
 process of conquest and migration which founded the 
 State itself. Till the general break-up of things established, 
 which followed immediately on the French Revolution, 
 many of the descendants of the original conquerors of 
 Europe continued to sit on the thrones which their ancestors 
 had established. Now that the chain of hereditary succes- 
 sion has, in most cases, been rudely broken, the position 
 established by the founders of the modem State still exists 
 under other names. Kingship is perhaps the most suc- 
 cessful institution of Politics. 
 
 But we must be careful not to suppose that the first kings 
 were institutions; they were merely individuals. The 
 earliest kings were, as we have seen, successful military 
 adventurers, who had managed to conquer territories of con- 
 siderable size. By their own personal skill and prowess they 
 maintained their position, and enforced what they considered 
 to be their rights. What these rights were we shall enquire 
 a little later ; here we are concerned to notice that the com- 
 munities conquered bv the early host-leaders probably 
 
 (84)
 
 EARLY POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS 85 
 
 regarded the latter as temporary nuisances, who would in 
 due course be removed by the hand of death. Their posi- 
 tion was totally opposed to the old ideas of society; they 
 were much too stern, much too enterprising, much too 
 neglectful of time-honored practice, to suit the easy-going 
 ways of patriarchal society. They represented the future, 
 as the dying patriarchal society represented the past. 
 
 Permanence of the kingship.— The kings them- 
 selves were perfectly aware of this view. Probably, from the 
 very fact that they were successful warriors, they were men 
 of exceptional ability, not merely in war, but also in the 
 management of men. Leaders like Clovis, and Theodoric, 
 and Alaric, and Egbert, were not likely to make the mistake 
 of supposing that they could permanently maintain their 
 positions by the mere force of military prestige. And so, 
 although they clung tenaciously to their military powers, 
 although the military origin of modern kingship has never 
 really been forgotten, they began to buttress up their 
 authority by appeals to other sanctions. 
 
 Absorbs the chiefship.— One of the most skilful of 
 these appeals was the appropriation by the kings of the 
 character and attributes of the tribal chief whom they had 
 conquered or dispossessed. It is possible that, in a few 
 cases, they were, really and truly, members of tribal aristoc- 
 racies, though probably not of the aristocracies of the tribes 
 whom they had conquered. In most cases, they were 
 simply adventurers, who had obtained their positions by 
 sheer hard fighting. But they soon, by a series of fictions 
 which could only have been accepted in a simple age, 
 persuaded their subjects that they really were members of 
 the ancient families whom they had overcome. The pedi- 
 gree of an early European king generally led up to some 
 well-known Hero, who had long been regarded with rever- 
 ence as the mythical ancestor of the tribe or tribes over 
 which he was ruling. A simpler method by which a con- 
 queror attached himself to the tribal instincts of his subjects
 
 86 A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 was by marrying the daughter of the greatest of the 
 conquered chiefs. Although by strict patriarchal law none 
 of the rights and privileges of a patriarch could go in the 
 female line, theunion was valuable for sentimental purposes ; 
 and such a policy undoubtedly helped, as it has often done 
 in later times, to strengthen the position of an intruder. 
 
 The great result of this skilful borrowing of patriarchal 
 ideas was that the kingship quickly became hereditary. We 
 have seen that the position of host-leader was originally 
 elective, not, of course, in the sense that it was balloted or 
 even voted for, like the chairmanship of a modern committee, 
 but in the sense that no one was entitled to it by right of 
 birth. The host-leader was chosen by the informal adherence 
 of those who admired his valour. But it was essential to 
 the success of kingship that it should become hereditary ; 
 and, fortunately, the desire to hand a great position over to 
 one's children is one of the deepest instincts of average 
 humanity.* So all the energies of the early kings were bent 
 towards this end ; and their success was due chiefly to their 
 skilful borrowing of patriarchal ideas. The dream of an 
 elective monarchy is one of the chimaeras of the political 
 Utopian. According to his amiable theory, freedom of 
 election secures the best possible man. In sober truth, as 
 evidenced by the facts of history, it results in one of three 
 consequences. Either the country is torn in pieces by 
 contending factions — the fate of Poland ; or the kingship is 
 gradually shorn of its rights and possessions, which are 
 given away as bribes to important electors by ambitious 
 candidates— the fate of the Holy Roman Empire; or, 
 finally, the electors deliberately choose a nonentity, who has 
 no enemies, and who will be an obedient puppet in the 
 hands of wire-pullers. This is the fate of the electoral 
 Presidency of the modern Republic, which is a kingship in 
 
 *Modern instances, of course, are to be found ; e. g., Cromwell and 
 Napoleon, both of whom tried to make their positions hereditary.
 
 EARLY POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS 87 
 
 all but name. Only in times of extreme and obvious 
 danger, and even then only when the electors are thoroughly 
 honest, does an election produce a really good king. 
 
 Traces of elective monarchy.— As a matter of fact, 
 in the great majority of the European monarchies the 
 tradition of an elective leader lingered for a few generations, 
 with just sufficient vitality to show that it had once been 
 genuine. It resulted, practically, in the notion that an heir- 
 apparent might be rejected for positive infirmity, whether of 
 body or mind. But, though the hereditary principle was 
 accepted, it was not the modem but the ancient or patri- 
 archal form of it which for a long time prevailed, and 
 which gave the succession to the eldest male of the royal 
 house, not to the son of the last occupant of the throne. 
 This older form of hereditary succession lingered in Russia 
 until the seventeenth century. 
 
 Becomes peligious.— By these means the kingship 
 became an institution, or permanent machine for carrying on 
 the business of government. People came to look upon it 
 as natural and inevitable that a king should rule over them. 
 But the early kings made another admirable move when 
 they assumed a religious position, by allying themselves 
 with the Church. We have seen something of the origin of 
 this alliance (p. 78) ; here it is only necessary to call 
 attention to the well-known fact of the close connection 
 between the kingship and the Church in the early days of 
 the State. Throughout all Christendom, bishops and priests 
 were the most intimate counsellors and the most enthusiastic 
 supporters of the Crown ; and the rich gifts of the kings 
 were amply repaid by the halo of sanctity which the grateful 
 Church threw around the person and office of the king. 
 From the day of his accession, when the sacred oil was 
 poured upon his head, to the day of his death, when his grave 
 was blessed by the Church, the monarch was surrounded 
 and guarded by ecclesiastics. In Oriental countries, in 
 Mahommedan States, the union is even closer ; for there the
 
 88 A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 Head of the State is also Head of tlie Church. But there is 
 actually an example in outlying Christendom in which the 
 archbishopric of the Church has become hereditary in the 
 line of secular rulers ; and ev^en in Europe the intimate 
 connection between the king and the Church was the best 
 possible safeguard against any revival of patriarchalism, in 
 connection with ancestor worship. 
 
 2. The Council.— We have seen (p. 75) that in the rude 
 beginnings of monarchy, the host-leader is found always to 
 be surrounded by his followers ox companions, men devoted 
 entirely to his service, on the terms that he shall provide 
 them with maintenance and opportunities for distinction. 
 As the host-leader developed into the king, this body of 
 followers became the council of the kingdom. Placed in 
 the midst of a hostile country, the king and his followers 
 were absolutely essential to one another's safety. Without 
 their support, the king could not hold his conquest ; without 
 his master mind, they would fall victims in detail to racial 
 hostility. The success of the king meant the enrichment of 
 his followers ; the contentment and prosperity of his fol- 
 lowers meant the safety of the king. We may put aside as 
 premature any definite theories about the right of the 
 council, in those early days, to control the actions of the 
 king. All our accounts of the relationship between the 
 early king and his council go to show that the former, if he 
 chose to run the risk of becoming unpopular, could do what 
 he liked. Although, perhaps, the council gained somewhat 
 in the eyes of the king's subjects by being regarded as the 
 successor of the old tribal council of elders, yet, in reality, 
 it was the body of the kirig's servants, chosen by him at his 
 pleasure. Nevertheless, the existence of the council did 
 soon undoubtedly become a substantial check on the 
 despotic tendencies of the king. A theory grew up that a 
 good king consulted his council frequently, that he listened 
 to its advice. And from this point the step was compara- 
 tively short to the doctrine that the king ought to consult,
 
 EARLY POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS 89 
 
 and, finally, that he imist consult his council. And thus, in 
 reality, the council is the germ of what we call constitutional 
 government. But, long before it became a bulwark of 
 popular liberties, the council had rendered invaluable service 
 to the kingship as an institution, and this in at least four 
 ways. 
 
 (a) It ppesepved the continuity.— Kingship may be 
 perpetual ; but, in fact, the individual king dies. And, 
 between the death of one king and the succession of another 
 there lies a critical moment. The forces of anarchy are 
 ready to break out. "The king died on the following day 
 . . . then there was tribulation soon in the land, for every 
 man that could forthwith robbed another," says an old 
 chronicler. There is always the chance that old ideas may 
 revive, and set people longing for the good old days when 
 every one did that which was right in his own eyes. We 
 must remember that a successful monarchy really does run 
 counter to a good many cherished practices. It does not, 
 for example, permit of blood-feuds or tribal forays ; it 
 probably has incurred the resentment of old religions ; it 
 has sanctioned practices which ancient prejudice regards as 
 monstrous ; it has, probably, exacted a good deal of tribute. 
 So there are always people waiting for a good opportunity 
 to revolt against it. But the existence of the council tides 
 over the dangerous moment. Though in strict theory the 
 death of the king dissolves his council, in fact the members 
 of council hold together, in hopes of being appointed by 
 his successor. And, in the meantime, they keep the 
 political machine going. 
 
 {b) It ppesepved the traditions.— One of the greatest 
 dangers to the newly-established kingship is the risk of 
 offending its subjects by exhibitions of caprice. It has to 
 deal with a community living according to immemorial 
 custom. It is bound to effect alterations to a certain extent ; 
 but, if it is wise, it will do so as little as possible. Above 
 all, it must avoid unnecessary changes. It is almost better,
 
 90 A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 under some conditions, to persevere in a bad policy than to 
 change it for a good one. The average man, especially if 
 he be of a patriarchal type, suspects and hates change. But 
 a body of councillors is far less likely to be capricious than a 
 single ruler ; its members will possibly have something to 
 lose by a change of policy. Its influence will, in the vast 
 majority of cases, be against change. 
 
 (<r) It broke the obloquy.— As we have said, govern- 
 ment, especially a newly-established government, is bound 
 to be unpopular, at least to a certain extent. If the whole 
 of the criticism provoked by its acts were to fall on the head 
 of a single individual, his position would become very pre- 
 carious. But if the blame can be distributed amongst his 
 advisers, or if even, in extreme cases, one or more of these 
 advisers can be sacrificed to the popular discontent, much 
 will be gained by the Head of the State. Being an imper- 
 sonal authority, a council can stand criticism much better 
 than an individual. This may not be a very dignified or 
 enjoyable function of the council, but it is a very valuable 
 one from this point of view of the State. 
 
 {d) It incpeased the activity.— The limits of the 
 activity of a single individual are soon reached. Even a 
 king like Frederick the Great cannot know personally very 
 much of what is going on in his dominion. But he would 
 know still less if it were not for his councillors. By their 
 own observations, and through their agents, they find out 
 things which are going on, and repeat them to the king. 
 As with knowledge, so with action. The king can, per- 
 sonally, do but little. Even in early days, when the king 
 was still, in the main, a warrior, he could not personally 
 protect all his dominions at once. Still less could he, when 
 the business of his position became (as it did become) 
 enormously increased, conduct it all himself. But his 
 council could be increased to any size ; and thus he could, 
 as it were, provide himself with an unlimited number of 
 hands.
 
 EARLY POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS 91 
 
 3. The local agents. — Hitherto we have assumed 
 that the king's councillors have, save for short intervals of 
 absence, surrounded his person, either on the battle-field 
 or in the palace or hall. This was, as we have seen, the 
 old idea. The war-leader's companions, in time of peace, 
 fed at his table and lived in his house. And the idea 
 has never been abandoned. The Court of the monarch, 
 even in modern times, is actually in attendance on the person 
 of the king. But, when the freebooting leader became the 
 king of a territory, he required supporters, not only round 
 his throne, but also all over his territory. We have already, 
 in the preceding chapter, had a glimpse of the readiest plan. 
 The conqueror accepted the allegiance of such of the old 
 patriarchal authorities as were willing to submit to him, and 
 continued them in their old positions, as his representatives. 
 It was a dangerous practice, though, perhaps, less danger- 
 ous than forcible dispossession. The king felt safer where 
 the circumstances allowed him to place one of his own 
 trusted followers in the room of a dead or banished chief. 
 And, as the old nobles died out, the policy of replacing 
 them by the "king's thegns" was steadily pursued, until, 
 by a silent but revolutionary process, the country had been 
 mapped out into districts, each in charge of a representa- 
 tive of the central government. In all probability the dis- 
 tricts themselves would be little changed. In England, for 
 example, the local divisions which existed until the begin- 
 ning of the present century represented in the main the 
 ancient units of patriarchal society. The county or shire 
 was, in many cases at least, the district of a tribal settle- 
 ment — Sussex of the South Saxons, Dorsetshire of the 
 Dorssetas, Somerset of the Somersaetas, and so on. In 
 other cases, as Dr. Freeman pointed out, it was an artificial 
 district commanded by a fortified town, such as Bedfordshire, 
 Huntingdonshire, Derbyshire, and so on. But this was a 
 much later formation. And there are strong reasons to 
 believe that the hundred, the other great local division of
 
 92 A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 the Middle Ages, will ultimately be proved to have been the 
 territory of a clan. In later times, of course, the subdivision 
 becomes more minute, and we get the single tna7ior, under 
 its lord; but enough has been said to show how feudalism 
 began. 
 
 We must not, of course, suppose that the man who was 
 placed in charge of a local district was entirely excluded 
 from the Cormcil which surrounded the person of the king. 
 On the contrary, there seems to be little doubt that the 
 greatest of the king's subordinates, the earls in England and 
 Scotland, the dukes and counts on the Continent, always sat, 
 as of right, in the Council, at any rate on its solemn days of 
 session. We distinguish in the Witan of the Anglo-Saxon 
 kings, beside the royal princes and the great ecclesiastics, 
 two classes of people, the ealdornien and the thegns. The 
 former undoubtedly had a local position as heads of the 
 shires ; the latter were, probably, the humbler followers of 
 the king, who lived permanently at his court. But it is 
 unlikely that the smaller local representatives, the " landed 
 thegns" (as we may call them) sat in the Council. 
 
 To conclude this chapter, we may ask. What were the 
 duties imposed upon these local representatives by the 
 early kings? And we shall hardly get a better answer than 
 by referring once more to the picturesque words of the 
 Heiniskringla, which describe Harold Fairhair as subduing 
 all Norway "withscatt, and duties, and lordships." 
 
 (a) Seatt or Tribute is, of course, one of the prime 
 objects of the conqueror. Historians sometimes speak of 
 primitive warriors as though they fought simply for the 
 love of fighting. No doubt there are some races— for 
 example, the Maoris of New Zealand half a century ago, — to 
 whom the excitement of the battle seems really to be an 
 end in itself. But in the majority of cases, ancient and 
 modem, the stimulus of an aggressive war has been either 
 revenge or, in one form or another, plunder. Sometimes 
 the plunder has been merely of a temporary kind, as in the
 
 EARLY POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS 93 
 
 raids of the Vikings. But the warrior who is a little more far- 
 seeing than the Viking looks forward to systematic and con- 
 tinuous plunder. To this end, he establishes a kingdom ; 
 and when he has established it, he sets to work to exact a 
 steady supply of tribute. Doubtless, to a man of the tem- 
 perament we have tried to describe, there is something in 
 itself attractive in ruling over a mass of subjects. But the 
 notion that a ruler lives for the good of his subjects is 
 a very [rare development in the early days of the State. 
 The real importance of tribute in the beginnings of politi- 
 cal organization may be most vividly realized in the 
 Mahommedan States of the East, such as the Empire of 
 Akbar in India in the sixteenth century, and in the Persian 
 and Turkish Empires at the present day. As Mr. Baden 
 Powell has well pointed out, it is, in its origin, primarily a 
 levy on agricultural produce, a "share of the heap on the 
 threshing-floor ;" and, in the case of the Moghul Empire, 
 it rose as high as one-third of the produce. In the harder- 
 won conquests of the founders of the European States, a 
 more decent disguise was adopted. The conquerors appro- 
 priated the customary offerings made by the tribesmen to 
 their ancient chiefs, the food rents and /eastings of patri- 
 archal times. Also they appropriated the lands which had 
 been set apart for the maintenance of the patriarchal 
 chiefs, and let them out to tenants of their own who 
 paid them a return in money or kind. They estab- 
 lished, probably also by virtue of ancient custom, 
 their privileged claims to certain profitable incidents, 
 such as "royal" fish, mines of precious metals, the 
 contents of wrecks, and the great game of the forests. 
 All these miscellaneous items, lumped together, were 
 known in England as the "farm of the shire;" and long 
 formed the bulk of the royal revenue. Sometimes a more 
 direct demand was made of an additional sum for a special 
 purpose, e. g., the Danegelt in England, and the Dime in 
 France. Privileged towns paid, as we have said (p. 82),
 
 94 A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 substantial sums in return for guarantees of their trade 
 privileges. Only, in western Europe, there was always 
 some decent excuse, such as custom or bargain, for a 
 demand of tribute ; the Oriental meekness, which sub- 
 mits to the absolute demands of the States tax-gatherer, 
 has hardly been known in the arena of modern civilization. 
 
 (d) Duties. — Besides tribute, the conqueror has one 
 other imperative need ; viz., mililary service. He has, of 
 course, his own special followers, his "professional soldiers," 
 as we might say ; and he takes care to recruit their ranks 
 by making it worth the while of the most enterprising 
 young men among his subjects to join the service. But, 
 besides this volunteer army, he must have a reserve defen- 
 sive force, in case some rival warrior should attempt to 
 repeat at his expense the experiment which he has success- 
 fully conducted at the expense of others. And so he lays 
 it down generally that every man is bound to serve if 
 called upon — the able-bodied as combatants, the feebler as 
 makers and repairers of roads, bridges and forts. Often 
 an invidious distinction is drawn between those who are 
 actually expected to serve, and those who are debarred 
 by reason of social inferiority or heterodoxy in reli- 
 gion. But these do not escape ; they are subjected to a 
 special tax in lieu of service. The practice afterwards 
 spreads, and a general commutation of war-service for tax- 
 ation is adopted. Then, perhaps, after a few generations, a 
 reforming king renews the liability to personal service — but 
 the taxation is not remitted. 
 
 {c) Lordships. — These were, in fact, the great and 
 charactistic engine by which the head of the State obtained 
 his taxes and duties. In days in which means of communi- 
 cation were very imperfect, it was impossible for the central 
 government to keep in touch with all its subjects. And 
 sos as we have seen (p. 80), the conquered territory was 
 parcelled out among the followers of the king, either his 
 own fellow-adventurers, or patriarchal authorities who had
 
 EARLY POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS 95 
 
 accepted his rule. From the point of view of the king, 
 these officials were servants ; but, from the point of view 
 of the inhabitants of their districts, they were lords. In 
 order that they might fulfil their tasks of collecting trib- 
 ute and soldiers, they were allowed to exercise a good deal 
 of authority over their districts. This authority, no doubt, 
 in many cases was looked upon, by themselves and their 
 subjects, as being of the old patriarchal character ; but by 
 the king it was always carefully treated as a delegation from 
 himself, and, in fact, it was largely the knowledge that the 
 local potentate would be backed, if need were, by the 
 royal army, that made his administration effective. As the 
 patriarchal nobility died out, the royal character of the 
 local official became more and jnore obvious ; until at last 
 he came to be looked upon exclusively as a royal nominee, 
 unless, indeed, as not unfrequently 'happened, he tried to 
 set up on his own account as a feudal magnate. 
 
 Not only, however, was the local authority responsible 
 for tribute and for soldiers ; he was also answerable for the 
 peace of his district. It is one of the most honorable tradi- 
 tions of monarchy, that it has everywhere set its face against 
 internal disorder. In patriarchal times, as we have seen, a 
 man was guaranteed against violence by his tribe, later by 
 his clan or gild. But this protection virtually resolved 
 itself into a liability to exact revenge ; and the plan did not, 
 therefore, tend to complete tranquillity. The monarchy, in 
 its earlier days, preferred to entrust the maintenance of 
 security to its own agents, at any rate in the case of the 
 lower ranks of society. And so the local representative of 
 the crown was entrusted with what we should call very ex- 
 tensive police powers, and in return his personal safety was 
 protected by exceptional penalties. In the earliest days of 
 the monarchy, the fact that a slain-tnan was a "king's ser- 
 vant" rendered his slayer liable to a three-fold murder fine. 
 Somewhat later the same policy reappeared, in the same 
 condemnation pronounced upon any man who should dare
 
 96 
 
 A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 to raise his hand against his lord. For, with the duty of 
 collecting tribute from the people of his district, with the 
 power of enrolling them for military service, with the exer- 
 cise over them of disciplinary authority, the State's local 
 representative had indeed become the lord of his neigh- 
 bours ; and so the words of the HeimskringCa are 
 explained.
 
 CHAPTER X 
 The State and Property 
 
 No POLITICAL institution is of greater importance, none 
 has been the subject of greater controversy, than the institu- 
 tion o{ property. There is none, therefore, more fit for the 
 appHcation of the historical method, which knows no preju- 
 dices and admits no passions, but simply relates facts. 
 
 We begin, of course, by asking the question — What is 
 property ? And, leaving aside technicalities, a good simple 
 answer to the question is, that it is the right vested in a 
 human being, or a limited number of hurnafi beings, to 
 absorb for his or their own benefit the various advantages 
 which can be derived from a physical subject matter. 
 
 A Fight. — There are one or two points to be specially 
 noted in this definition. First, what do we mean by a right? 
 And, again putting aside technicalities, we may define a 
 right as being a power etiforced by public sentiment. If I 
 have bought a book in an open and honest way, public senti- 
 ment approves of my dealing with the book as I please. In 
 early times, public opinion is expressed only in the vague 
 form of custom ; in later days, it is definitely expressed in 
 legislation, and enforced by tribunals and officials. It some- 
 times happens that the exercise of a right is opposed to 
 public sentiment, either because there are special circum- 
 stances which render a particular application of it unpopular, 
 or because public sentiment has changed. Nevertheless, a 
 right is really the creation of public sentiment, past or 
 present. 
 
 o (97)
 
 98 A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 Vested In human beings.— Again, we have said that 
 property is a right vested in a human being or hiitnan beings. 
 Many of the instincts and desires which have led to the ap- 
 pearance oi property among mankind are obviously present 
 in the brute creation. No one who has watched a dog bury 
 a bone, or has seen a monkey pilfer nuts, will for a moment 
 doubt this fact. But, nevertheless, we do not speak of 
 animals having property. Why? Simply because public 
 sentiment does not support them in the exercise of their de- 
 sires. We recognize, perhaps, very faintly, the moral right 
 of the domesticated animal to a bare maintenance out of the 
 produce of his labours — "Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that 
 treadeth out the corn." But we do not hesitate, if need be, 
 to withhold the corn, or to slaughter the ox. 
 
 In limited numbers.— Again, property is a right vested 
 in a human being or a limited number of human beings. The 
 essence of it, as its name implies, is the appropriation, the 
 making special to an individual or a small group of indi- 
 viduals, of a part of the common stock of things. Some- 
 times, it is true, we speak of public property ; but this is 
 really a contradiction in terms. We signify, in fact, that the 
 thing to which we allude is not any one' s property at all, and, 
 therefore, that any one may use it. When we really mean 
 that the thing in question is claimed by a very large but 
 definite body, we do not use the word property, but some 
 word which conveys a different idea. Thus we say that 
 England is the territory of the English people. If we called 
 it their property, we should at once have to admit that no 
 individual Englishman could have any part of it as his 
 roper ty ; which is notoriously untrue. 
 
 Exercised over subject matter.- Once more, these 
 rights must be exercised over physical subject matter, for 
 that alone is really capable of appropriation. In a figurative 
 way we can, of course, speak o( property in ideas ; but the 
 extreme difficulty which we find in protecting such property 
 shows that it differs entirely from property in the correct
 
 THE STATE AND PROPERTY 99 
 
 sense of the term. Ideas are spontaneous, the same ideas 
 may spring up independently in thousands of minds, they 
 have no definite beginning or ending, they are intangible. 
 How can they be protected by agencies similar to those 
 which we employ for the protection of physical subject 
 matter? 
 
 Fop general purposes.— Finally, the right of property 
 is a right to absorb the various advantages (known and un- 
 known) which are derivable from a thing. Here is the real 
 difficulty of the subject, and the key to its history. As the 
 jurists say, property is d, general right. If I have borrowed 
 a horse simply to ride from London to Putney, I do not 
 speak of him as my property. Even if I have jobbed him 
 for a whole season, I do not speak of him as mine. It is 
 only when I am related to the horse in such a way that I 
 may, if I. please, ride him or drive him, or put him to plough 
 or to work in a milk-cart, may kill him or sell him, give him 
 away or turn him out to grass, in fact do anything with him 
 I please which does not conflict with the public sentiment of 
 the community, that I am entitled to speak of him as my 
 property. With the abolition of slavery, there ceased to be 
 property in human beings. Yet we all know that one man 
 may have special rights over another, e. g., a master over his 
 servant, a husband over his wife, and so on. But these are 
 limited and definite rights. 
 
 A modern idea. — Therefore, we make a great mistake 
 if we take our very modern idea oi property, and, looking 
 back into the early history of mankind, expect to find it 
 realized by people in those days. We start with the wrong 
 question. We should not ask — In whom was property 
 vested in those days ? but. Was there atiy property at all? 
 
 If this sounds to modern ears an absurd question, it may 
 become less absurd when we consider a modern illustration. 
 Broadly speaking, the high seas are not, at the present day, 
 the property of any one. Why? For the simple reason 
 that, at present, the only advantage to be derived from them
 
 lOO A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 is the convenience of traffic. And as there is room enough 
 and to spare for all the ships in the world to pass over them, 
 the question of property in them does not arise. But we 
 can very easily foresee that it might arise ; in fact, we can 
 guess pretty shrewdly the lines on which it will arise some 
 day. If the practice of laying ocean cables extends very 
 much, or if coastal waters no longer supply sufficient fish for 
 the world's consumption, we shall soon have the high seas 
 eagerly claimed as territory by different States, And if 
 this occurs, we shall ultimately go a step further, and see the 
 territory of each State divided up as property among its 
 members, as the advantages to be derived from it increase. 
 We have reached the first stage already, in what are called 
 territorial waters ; where the advantages to be derived from 
 fishing, shipping and gunning are sufficient to induce 
 States to appropriate. 
 
 This, then, is the key to the history of property as an 
 institution — the growth of knowledge. As men become 
 more and more awake to the advantages to be derived from 
 the use of physical things, the more anxiously and completely 
 do they appropriate them. And thus it was impossible for 
 us to study the history of property until we realized how 
 man's knowledge of the resources of Nature had gradually 
 grown. Now we are in a position to summarize it clearly. 
 
 In the first, or hutiting stage, of society, the requirements 
 of men are limited to hunting-grounds, camping grounds 
 and weapons. Men know that the more the game is hunted 
 in a particular district, the less there will be to hunt. They 
 therefore manifest great jealousy of any interference with 
 their hunting-grounds. Similarly, their very existence may 
 depend on a camp with a proper supply of water. They 
 resent, therefore, any occupation of spots which they are 
 accustomed to use for camping. Unhappily, the reports of 
 travellers upon savage society, though dealing largely with 
 the physical character of primitive weapons, do not, appar- 
 ently, tell us much about the savage's ideas respecting their
 
 THE STATE AND PROPERTY loi 
 
 ownership. But we shall probably not be far wrong in 
 assuming that weapons were among the very earliest 
 examples o{ properfy ; the frequency with which they were 
 used, the extreme importance of their being kept in good 
 order, the ease with which they could be physically con- 
 trolled, would rapidly generate the idea of appropriation. 
 The germ of property, it must again be said, is user; the 
 captured booty is readily shared, but the favourite and often- 
 used weapon is jealously guarded. There is some evidence 
 also to show that religious paraphernalia, such as sacred 
 belts and feathers and stones, are early appropriated to 
 groups of men. But a savage's weapon can only be used by 
 one man at a time ; and so it lends itself the more readily to 
 appropriation. 
 
 The hunting country. — If we want to realize the 
 savage's immature notions of the advantages to be derived 
 from land, we may take the modern example of a hunting 
 country. The Hunt and its Master do not object to people 
 walking over the land, to pasturing cattle and sheep upon it, 
 to growing corn upon it or even to building houses and living 
 upon it. So long as people do not disturb the foxes or put 
 barbed wire, they are regarded with toleration. The Hunt 
 regards the country as its own, and jealously resents any 
 trespass by a strange pack. But it does not claim the 
 country as its property. 
 
 Pastoral stage. — When we travel a stage further we 
 find changes which develop still further the rudimentary idea 
 of property. The continued association of the herdsman 
 with his cattle and sheep, his perception of the increased 
 advantages which can be derived from them — their hides, 
 wool and milk — strengthens the relationship between him 
 and them. In this stage, movable chattels (i. e., "cattle") 
 may fairly be said to have reached the stage oi property, even 
 of individual property. But so also must wives, children and 
 slaves. As we have seen, the perception of the value of 
 human labotir leads to a desire to appropriate it. The words
 
 xoa A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 which, in primitive law, signify the relation between a 
 patriarch and his cattle, signify also the relationship between 
 him and his wives, children and slaves. It is only in later 
 times that the different classes become differentiated. At 
 first, it would seem that birth in the patriarch's household is 
 the normal title to property. A very interesting old Swedish 
 formula, in the primitive procedure for theft, makes the 
 claimant say that the ox alleged to have been stolen was 
 bred and reared in his stall. But it is probable that, as the 
 tribe broke up into clans, and the clans into households, 
 the old idea that booty was the general prize of the pack 
 died out; and the successful cattle-reiver appropriated the 
 captive of his own hands. Finally, as the notion of exchange 
 developed, a man claimed that which he had taken in 
 exchange, or bought ; but there is abundant evidence to 
 show that, even in historical times, purchase, especially of 
 flocks and herds, was looked upon with great suspicion, and 
 that the man who was found with a strange ox in his 
 possession ran a strong risk of being branded as a thief 
 Only in -markets and such like well-known places, and 
 before proper witnesses, could a sale be safely conducted. 
 And in English law at the present day, the sale in opett 
 market has a very special force, which reminds us of this 
 ancient rule. 
 
 So far, then, we may tabulate our stages in the history of 
 property thus — 
 (i) User. 
 
 (2) Production. 
 
 (3) Seizure (perhaps). 
 
 (4) Exchange. 
 
 Agpieultupal stage.— Now we have arrived at the 
 agricultural stage. And here, it is evident, we are on the 
 brink of a great development of the idea of property in land. 
 The pastoralist regards his "country" much as the hunter. 
 It is the feeding-ground for the herds of the tribe. Perhaps 
 the jealousy of strangers is a little keener, because tame
 
 THE STATE AND PROPERTY 103 
 
 cattle are easier to steal than wild game. Probably, also, 
 the user which the individual tribesman may make of the 
 tribal land is more strictly defined. But there is as yet no 
 individual right in land, for land is still regarded only as 
 pasture and hunting-ground ; and there is no need of parti- 
 tion for these purposes. But the agriculturist soon forms 
 new ideas. As each new improvement in cultivation makes 
 land more valuable, the clan, or the family, or the man who 
 made the improvement, becomes less willing to see it pass 
 into the hands of others, less willing to move on to other 
 land on which less labour has been expended. And so 
 agricultural land became, as we have seen, appropriated to 
 the clan amongst whose members it was periodically inter- 
 changed ; and, finally, even this redistribution ceased, and 
 the family, ultimately the individual, became permanently 
 associated with a specific piece of land. 
 
 Still far from modepn ideas.— This is a long step ; 
 but it is still very far from bringing us to the modern notion 
 oi private property in land. All that we have arrived at is, 
 that the same man may go on year after year ploughing the 
 same piece of land, and, it may be, his children after him. 
 That would not satisfy the landowner of the present day. 
 
 Limited user. — Observe, in the first place, the man may 
 only use the land for agriculture. It is true that one of the 
 first real social results of agriculture was to substitute the 
 wooden house for the herdsman's tent; and the farmer was 
 allowed to build himself a house in the village, and to inhabit 
 it permanently. Also he was allowed to enclose a little toft 
 or garden space, and a cro/t or meadow, both near his 
 house, for the supply of his family and domestic animals. 
 But the bulk of "his" land (if we may call it so) he had 
 still not only to plough and reap, but to plough and reap in 
 the regular way at fixed times. (See p. 53.) If he had 
 not, his fellow-villagers would have complained. If he had 
 attempted, for example, to keep cattle and sheep in his 
 strips, he would have ruined their crops ; and he would
 
 104 A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 likewise have incurred the jealousy of those members of the 
 clan who still longed for broad pastures, and who regarded 
 the new practice of agriculture with dislike. The world's 
 history is full of this quarrel, from the days when patricians 
 and plebeians in Rome fought over the State lands, to the 
 days when the squatters (sheep-farmers) of Australia were 
 at loggerheads with the selectors (agriculturists) over a 
 precisely similar question. 
 
 No alienation. — Again, the farmer had his house and 
 land, but he might not sell them. The agricultural village 
 of primitive times was, as we have explained (p. 60), a very 
 "close" thing. No strangers could get a footing in it, at 
 least without the unanimous consent of the village. And 
 the members of the clan would not want to buy lands, 
 because they could get them for nothing. 
 
 Action of the State. — But the appearance of the State, 
 combined, no doubt, with economic influences, accom- 
 plished the final stage in the evolution of property. The 
 results of its policy may be said to have been two-fold. It 
 created a landlord class, and it dissolved the village cotn- 
 tnunity. 
 
 I. LandlOFdism. — As we have seen (p. 91), one of the 
 earliest measures of the State was to plant its representa- 
 tives in the various localities of its territory, for the pur- 
 poses of exacting tribute, levying soldiers and maintaining 
 order. We may be fairly sure that, when the State made 
 their appointments, it had no clear intention of converting 
 the districts entrusted to its representatives into property. 
 When the Crown at the present day appoints a man Col- 
 lector of Customs at the port of Liverpool, or Lord Lieu- 
 tenant of the county of Surrey, it does not make him owner 
 of the soil on which Liverpool stands, or of the county of 
 Surrey. In the language of early times, it was lordship the 
 State meant to confer, not property. 
 
 InhePitanee.— But this lordship tended to ripen into 
 property. In the first place, the State's representative, as
 
 THE STATE AND PROPERTY 105 
 
 we have seen (p. qt), probably was either a tribal or a clan 
 chief, or stood in the place of one. But the position of a 
 tribal or clan chief was hereditary. It is not surprising, 
 therefore, to find that lordsJiip became hereditary also ; 
 much in the same way as the Crown itself had done (p. 86). 
 This was, of course, one of the most striking features of 
 feudalism. But an office which can be inherited soon 
 begins to look very like property. 
 
 Rent.— In the second place, the Crown's representative 
 had to pay a certain sum of money as the equivalent of his 
 lordship. If he did not, his lordship was taken away and 
 given to some one else. In well-governed countries, the 
 amount which had to be rendered was fixed and reason- 
 able ; but this very fact quickly tended to obscure its origin. 
 In the course of a few generations, the representative would 
 come to look upon his district as his ozun, subject to pay- 
 ment of a fixed return, or rent. 
 
 Profit. — For, in the third place, the State's representa- 
 tive was from the first intended to make a profit out of his 
 office. The wholesome system of paying State officials by 
 fixed salaries, and rigidly demanding an account of all 
 receipts, is a very modern innovation ; and, even now, is 
 very far from complete, even in civilized countries. In the 
 early days of the State, the universal practice was to 
 covipotmd with the official for a fixed sum, and to let him 
 keep all the surplus which he could collect. There was, 
 therefore, a direct inducement to the official to increase his 
 demands upon the people he was set to govern. And this, 
 also, caused him to look upon his district as his owtt. 
 
 Land. — Finally, it must again be remembered that 
 almost everything in the way of taxes in early times came 
 directly from the profits of agriculture. In other words, it 
 came direct from the land. It was natural, therefore, that 
 the Crown's representative should look to the land of his 
 subjects as the real security for the tribute he intended to 
 collect. And this point of view had two important results.
 
 lo6 A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 as population increased and land became, accordingly, more 
 valuable. It made it very tempting for a lord to turn out one 
 occupier who did not pay his tribute. It also induced him 
 to encourage people to bring fresh land into cultivation, 
 because such a course meant more tribute. Such fresh set- 
 tlements were made at the lord's direction, and, of course, 
 within the limits of his district. By thus dealing with and 
 disposing of the land of his district, the lord became more 
 and more to look upon himself, and to be looked upon, as 
 the owner of his district. The "lord of land," as the old 
 documents call him, became the landlord of modern times. 
 
 It may be said by hasty observers that there is nothing 
 really of importance in this change, that it is really the old 
 set of things with a new set of names, that "lord," and 
 "man," and "tribute," merely become "landlord," and 
 "tenant," and "rent." But a moment's thought will show 
 this to be a fallacy. It assumes that the value of lattd will 
 always be the same ; whereas it is notorious that the value of 
 land steadily increases with the increase of population, i. e., 
 with the demands made upon it. And the question is, U'lto 
 is to have the increase in value, or, as it is often called, the 
 unearned increment? Let ^ represent the total annual 
 value of an acre of land in the thirteenth century. Let a 
 represent the amount which the State gets in tribute, b the 
 amount received by the " lord " (over and above that which 
 he pays to the State), y the amount pocketed by the occu- 
 pier ; and suppose a, b and y together just equal x. Now 
 step forward six centuries. The value of the annual pro- 
 duce of that same acre may possibly be quite five times x-. 
 Improved methods of cultivation have rendered it much more 
 productive, or coal has been found under it, or it has been 
 wanted for building, or a valuable spring of water has been 
 struck on it. Into whose pockets does this increase go ? 
 And, broadly speaking, all the world over, this increase has 
 gone into the pockets of the landlord class, who have suc- 
 ceeded in treating the land as their property. As a general
 
 THE STATE AND PROPERTY 107 
 
 rule, they have succeeded in preventing the State from 
 increasing the sum payable to it by themselves ; only in a 
 comparatively small number of cases have their " tenants" 
 succeeded in preventing them exacting increased tribute, in 
 the form of rent. The consequence has been that, whilst 
 the State above and the tenant below have gained compara- 
 tively little from the increase in the value of land, the inter- 
 mediate, or landlord class, has become enormously wealthy, 
 especially in those countries in which progress has been 
 greatest. Landlordism has been the most splendidly 
 rewarded of all political services. The class which began 
 as revenue collectors, and local maintainers of order, has 
 become owners of the soil, and arbiters of the comfort and 
 prosperity of millions of human beings. In the old centres 
 of industry the position of the landlord is much less 
 marked, inasmuch as the old tribute pressed less heavily 
 on the urban classes, and they were less dependent on a 
 particular piece of soil for their existence. Nevertheless, 
 the existence of valuable market rights, tolls and other 
 town privileges in the hands of great proprietors reveals the 
 fact that the tendencies in the town were the same as in 
 the country, though the opportunities were less. And, 
 where towns have grown up since the development of the 
 institution of property in land, the profits reaped by the 
 fortunate landlords who have owned property in their sites 
 have, of course, been colossal. 
 
 2. Dissolution of the village community.— It would, 
 however, be quite wrong to suppose that the development 
 of lordship into landlordship is solely accountable for the 
 institution of property in land. It accounts chiefly for great 
 landowners ; but there are small landowners as well as 
 great. 
 
 In a sense, as we have seen, the ordinary villager of the 
 early agricultural epoch was in one sense a landowner. That 
 is to say, he probably could not, in most cases, be turned 
 out of his land so long as he conformed to the village cus-
 
 Zo8 A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 toms, so long as he paid, in the form of labour or money, 
 his share of the village liabilities, and so long as he con- 
 formed to the customs of the village. But he had not the 
 two important rights which every owner oi property now 
 looks upon as part of his ordinary powers ; viz. , the right to 
 dispose of his interest by sale or gift, and the right to use 
 his land as he thinks fit. Under these two heads we may 
 consider the dissolution of the village community. 
 
 (a) Disposal of interest. — From the beginning of its 
 history, we find the State manifesting a dislike to the village 
 community. The military character of the State inclines it 
 to deal with individuals rather than with communities. It 
 prefers to deal with the village through the individual lord ; 
 where it recognizes the existence of the village group, it 
 deals with it through its representatives (as we shall here- 
 after see). In the minds of the early kings there was, 
 manifestly, a feeling that the existence of the village brother- 
 hood was, in a way, a danger to its own authority. There 
 are abundant traces in the Barbarian Laws of a determina- 
 tion on the part of the kings that the village shall not take 
 upon itself to punish its own members. Another claim the 
 kings obstinately insist upon ; viz., that a stranger, furnished 
 by them with "letters of settlement," shall be allowed to 
 take up land in the village. In early times there was no 
 physical difficulty in such a course ; land was plentiful, on 
 the borders of every village there was waste land. But it 
 was hateful to the villagers, just as hateful as it would be to 
 a modern household to have a "paying guest" forcibly 
 thrust upon it. The newcomer might be a spy in disguise ; 
 to a certain extent the village would be responsible for his 
 misdeeds ; he would probably have new-fangled notions of 
 farming. But the kings got their way. 
 
 Sales. — A still further step was taken when the State 
 began to recognize sales of village land, at any rate, sales to 
 outsiders. There is some reason to believe that, inside the 
 village group, a process had long been going on by which
 
 THE STATE AND PROPERTY 109 
 
 several holdings had accumulated in a single hand. In this 
 way we may account for the appearance of the prosperous 
 yeoman class, which is such a striking feature of the later 
 Middle Ages in Europe. But to sell to a stranger was long 
 forbidden, and only after a severe struggle was the right 
 established. There can be little doubt that the most power- 
 ful ally of the State in this matter was the Church, which, 
 though provided for to a certain extent within the village 
 system, by the custom of paying tithes, succeeded in ac- 
 quiring, by private gift, immense quantities of land. In 
 particular, the Church was clearly responsible, if not for the 
 invention, at least for the rapid development of the practice 
 of leaving lands by z£/z7/,»a practice which probably did more 
 than anything else to break up the old kinship principles on 
 which the village system was largely based. Finally, the 
 State put the finishing touch on the legal dissolution of the 
 village by sanctioning the taking of a debtor's land in satis- 
 faction of his debts. This was not, perhaps, such a violent 
 disregard of patriarchal principles as might at first sight ap- 
 pear. By these principles, as we have seen (p. 42), a man's 
 kindred were responsible for his misdeeds, and, in the times 
 of which we are now speaking, debts were usually the result 
 of failure to pay the blood-fine. But the old rule was that 
 the debtor paid with his body ; his land never left the clan. 
 In reversing this order of ideas, in giving the creditor a 
 remedy against the debtor's land, the State was dealing a 
 final blow at the communal character of the village. 
 
 {b) EnelOSUPe.— The physical side of the dissolution 
 took the form of the enclosure of the open fields. So long 
 as the lands of the villagers lay in scattered strips in the 
 open fields (p. 51), so long was there, at least in appearance, 
 and, to some extent, in practical working, a community. 
 Redistribution of the lands might have long ceased, but 
 independent farming was still impossible. A man whose 
 land consisted of fifty or sixty little strips lying mixed among 
 his neighbour's strips, "hide-meal and acre-meal," could
 
 no A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 not try experiments, could not use his own discretion. He 
 had to follow the course of husbandry sanctioned by the 
 village custom. But, towards the end of the Middle Ages, 
 there arose all over Europe a controversy, sometimes 
 picturesquely carried on in verse, between what was called 
 in England "champaign" and "several" farming. The 
 former was the old-fashioned method of working in great 
 open fields (^campi), the latter the modem system of culti- 
 vating in small compact fields enclosed by hedges. Of 
 course the advocates of the new plan had little difficulty in 
 proving its superior efficiency. It protected the diligent 
 farmer against the wastrel who let his patches grow thistles ; 
 it enabled the enterprising man to try experiments ; it 
 especially allowed him to keep sheep instead of growing 
 corn ; it thereby enabled him to economize in labour (which 
 was then scarce), for sheep-farming employs less hands 
 than agriculture. Of course the reformers got their way, 
 and, for a wonder, the reform brought artistic value with it 
 for it gave us, in England at least, the exquisite hedgerows 
 which are the glory of the countryside. Instead of a bundle 
 of scattered strips, the farmer received a more or less 
 compact block of the same extent, which he could deal with 
 as he liked.* But the change was the end, or almost the 
 end, of the village community; and it gave us property in 
 land of the most private kind. For the scattered villagers, 
 unless (as very rarely happened) they succeeded in throwing 
 off lordship as well as village ties, found themselves, after 
 the operation, isolated tcnafits of a great landowner, with 
 whom alone they had in future to deal, instead of members 
 of a village group, subject indeed to the claims of lordship, 
 but strong in mutual protection. The wealthier. of them 
 
 * The difference between land held on the old "open-field" system, 
 and the same land after an " enclosure" will be graphically realized 
 by a comparison of Plates A and B appended to this book. It will 
 be noticed that in Plate A the process of enclosure has only begun ; 
 in Plate B it has been completed.
 
 THE STATE AND PROPERTY in 
 
 signified their new attitude by moving away from the village 
 proper and building themselves new houses in the centres 
 of their new farms. The village became, more and more, 
 merely the abode of the cottagers ; the old yeoman houses 
 fell into ruins, or were divided up into tenements ; class 
 separation became more marked ; the labourers became 
 more and more cvage-earners, and less and less villagers 
 having an interest in the laiid. Only the waste or common 
 still survived, to mark the ancient character of the village. 
 In later times that has also in many cases been broken up ; 
 and the village has become the ideal of the individualist, a 
 place in which every man "does what he wills with his 
 own." 
 
 This has been a long story, and a difficult story to tell; 
 but no one who has endeavoured to study for himself the 
 history of the institution of property will ever pretend that it 
 is an easy task to relate it. Two points have, however, it is 
 hoped, been made clear. One is that the institution of 
 property, as we have it now, is no sudden invention, which 
 can be explained in an epigrammatic phrase by a platform 
 orator. It is, on the contrary, the outcome of a long chain 
 of historical causes, each contributing its quoto to the 
 complex result. To the elements, previously enumerated 
 (p. 102), oi user, production, seizure, exchange, we must now 
 add the elements of lordship, revenue, and econo^nic prog- 
 ress, all of which have some share in erecting the institu- 
 tion of property. The other point is, that while physical, 
 or, as we may perhaps call them, natural causes contributed 
 greatly to this result, the most powerful factor has been the 
 development of that particular form of association which we 
 term the State.
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 The State and Justice 
 
 We are so accustomed to look upon the administration of 
 justice as an inevitable duty of the State, that it requires an 
 effort to realize that this state of things also, like the rest of 
 our modern social organization, is the result of historical 
 growth. Now-a-days, all justice is (broadly speaking) 
 administered in England in the name of the Queen, that is, 
 of the Head of the State. But it was not always so. 
 
 Old ideas of justice. — As we have already seen (p. 
 42), the first notion of justice was that it consisted oi revenge 
 or retaliation. The blood feud was the earliest type of judi- 
 cial machinery, at least so far as private offences were con- 
 cerned. For offences so gross that they outraged the moral 
 sense of the community, there remained the drastic remedy 
 of expulsion from the community, by the community itself. 
 
 We have also seen (p. 42) that the first step towards a 
 milder state of things was the substitution of the blood-fine 
 or tnoney-paynient for the exercise of revenge. The earliest 
 offences were nearly all offences of violence ; therefore tlie 
 remedy of revenge was obvious and natural. When the 
 development of the notion oi property made theft a prominent 
 offence, restitution was naturally suggested ; and this fact, 
 together with a perception of the evils oi revenge, may have 
 led to a general acceptance of the money-payinent system. 
 As we have before said, early codes of law are often mainly 
 composed of elaborate tables of fines to be exacted for 
 particular offences. 
 
 (112)
 
 THE STATE AND JUSTICE 113 
 
 Absence of authoritative tribunals.— But it is to 
 
 be observed that, in patriarchal society, there never seems 
 to have been any authority capable of enforcing the money- 
 payment system. It was a voluntary system. The elders of 
 the tribe or clan seem to have acted as a persuasive body, 
 urging the parties to receive and pay respectively the sum 
 which they (the elders) declared to be the proper fine for 
 the offence. But if their persuasions failed, the parties were 
 entitled to resort to the feud. Imagine a modern judge 
 "persuading " Mi. William Sikes to "make it up " with the 
 relatives of his victim, and, on his remaining obdurate, 
 leaving the two families to fight the matter out. Yet this 
 course, quaint as it seems to us, is quite in accord with the 
 ideas of patriarchal justice. 
 
 Not applicable to public offences.— And it is also to 
 be observed that the system of fines did not touch public 
 offences. They were significantly described by the Teutonic 
 tribes as bootless wrongs, i. e., wrongs for which no bot or 
 payment could atone. When they were perpetrated, the 
 tribe or clan arose in its wrath, raised the hue mid cry, and 
 expelled the offender from its midst. This distinction is of 
 vital importance ; it was the germ of the modern distinction 
 between the crime which is prosecuted by the State, and 
 the civil wrong which is left to be brought before the Courts 
 by the injured party. 
 
 Survivals of the notion of revenge.— The funda- 
 mental notion that a private wrong gave rise to a lawful 
 exercise of revenge, unless the parties could be persuaded 
 to "swear the peace," lingered to the very end of patriarchal 
 times, and even passed over into political society. One of 
 its m.ost curious manifestations was the right of reprisal 
 practiced by merchants till quite the end of the Middle Ages. 
 If an Antwerp merchant, for example, did not pay a debt 
 which he owed to a Bristol merchant, the Bristol merchant's 
 gild seized the goods of any other Antwerp merchant who 
 was unlucky enough to be in Bristol at the time. And in
 
 114 A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 _/«<£fo/ jurisdictions the trial by battle, which is, of course, 
 only a modified form of tlie blood-feud, lingered until feudal 
 jurisdictions were themselves swept away. 
 
 Action of the State. — But in the matter of bootless 
 crimes, the State very early began to make itself felt. It is 
 very probable that the old communal remedy was not 
 rigorously enforced. What is every one's business is no 
 one's business ; and so, no doubt, many a heinous ofTender 
 escaped. But, even if it was enforced, the result would not 
 be satisfactory to the State. The State did not want to lose 
 its men, even if they were criminals. They might have 
 been very good soldiers, for all that they were violent 
 members of society. And so we find the practice growing 
 up of the State "redeeming the offender from the forest," 
 as the Swedish laws put it, i. e., of letting him return from 
 banishment or submitting to a penalty or punishmatt. The 
 hue and cry was raised at the instance of the State's offi- 
 cial ; but the offender, when caught, was punished and 
 allowed to return. This practice developed ultimately into 
 the process known as outlawiy in the Middle Ages, and 
 became exceedingly popular with the State ; because by a 
 train of reasoning which it is easy to follow, the outlaw's 
 goods were forfeited to the king. 
 
 The King's peace.— But the royal justice received a 
 great impetus from the development of another idea, the 
 idea of the King' s peace. It was quite natural that a mili- 
 tary ruler should sternly resent anything like disorder or 
 violence. Hence the State soon lays down the doctrine that 
 all offences of violence are offences against the State — 
 "against the peace of our Sovereign Lady the Queen," as 
 a modern indictment puts it. And a man who offends 
 against the State must expect punishment. In connection 
 with this idea comes in the institution of sanctuary, so 
 important a modifier of violence in primitive society. A 
 man has, perhaps accidentally, caused the death of another. 
 Fearing the vengeance of the dead man's kindred, he files
 
 THE STATE AND JUSTICE 115 
 
 to the nearest place of refuge, and claims the protection 
 of its master. The process is exactly described in the 
 Mosaic books of the Old Testament,* and is immensely 
 important in introducing the distinction between inten- 
 tional and accidental violence. In the case of the Jews, 
 the sanctuary was placed in charge of the Church (the 
 Levites) ; and in medieval history the Church's peace 
 also played a great part in the suppression of the blood- 
 feud. But, in the end, the King's peace became the most 
 important, because it was the most powerful. An amusing 
 modern form of the idea has manifested itself in Persia, 
 where the introduction of the telegraph has enabled a sup- 
 pliant to appeal to the Shah for sanctuary from a great dis- 
 tance. Every one has a right to approach the Shah by 
 telegram if he prepays a reply. The man who apprehends 
 violence goes to the telegraph office, dispatches his appeal, 
 and sits down to await the answer. As things in Persia 
 move with deliberation, this is probably several days in 
 arriving. But as the telegraph office is the Shah's property, 
 it is sanctuary ; and the suppliant, so long as he remains 
 there, is safe. It is no uncommon thing, therefore, to 
 see a little group of suppliants, fortified with food and 
 drink by their relatives, crouching in the telegraph office, 
 while a corresponding group of avengers of blood waits 
 eagerly outside. 
 
 Extension of the King's peace.— But it is quite easy, 
 by a little clever elaboration of the idea of the King' s 
 peace, to make it cover a whole multitude of offences which 
 are not really crimes of violence at all. Take, for instance, 
 the offence of theft, which is not usually accompanied by 
 violence, and was originally, and in its nature, a private 
 offence against individuals. But the State says that a theft, 
 successful or unsuccessful, is apt to lead to reprisals, and 
 reprisals mean v.oletice, and therefore theft is an offence 
 
 * Numbers xxxv. 6-33 ; Deut. xix. ; Joshua xx.
 
 Il6 A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 against the Kitii^'s peace. After the king has been satis- 
 fied, tlie injured party or his relatives may claim compensa- 
 tion ; but it is generally found that, after the king has been 
 satisfied, there is not much left for any one else. And so 
 thefi and such like offences become purely matters of crimi- 
 nal or public law. 
 
 Tpeason. — Thirdly, the State, as a military institution, 
 is peculiarly concerned with the allegiance of its subjects. 
 Anything that can be considered as a betrayal or defiance 
 of allegiance is a direct attack upon its security, and is 
 directly visited by it with punishment. Thus arises the 
 law of Ireasofi. And if we put together offences of peculiar 
 enormity, offences against the peace and treason, we get 
 the bulk of criminal law, at least in early times. That is 
 to say, we get the bulk of that law which the State itself 
 enforces, as opposed to that law which' is enforced by 
 private individuals. 
 
 The State and private offences.— The appearance 
 of the State in private lazusiiits is much later, and we find an 
 important intermediate stage between the moot of the elders, 
 with its merely persuasive power, and the tribunal of the 
 State itself. This was the court of the feudal lord. Partly, 
 no doubt, this result was due to the action of the State in 
 entrusting the maintenance of order in the local districts to 
 its representatives ; still more, perhaps, it was due to the 
 State's representative stepping into the shoes of the old 
 tribal or clan chief, who, of course, presided over the moot 
 of the elders. The result of the combination was a very 
 tenacious and powerful jurisdiction, which ultimately be- 
 came a serious rival to the State. On the one hand, it was 
 military in character ; for its president was really the State's 
 representative, and was endowed with a certain amount of 
 military force. Hence it was comparatively easy for him to 
 stamp out the blood-feud, and to compel the parties to it to 
 bring their quarrels before him. Then, after due inquiry, 
 and if compromise was impossible, it could be settled by a
 
 THE STATE AND JUSTICE 117 
 
 final and conclusive combat or battle, fought under strict 
 conditions. On the other hand, it was patriarchal also ; for 
 it followed the lines of the old patriarchal settlements, and 
 it comprised (at least in cases where freemen were in- 
 terested) the homage of the fief, whom we may strongly 
 suspect to have been largely identical with the elders of the 
 clan. A curious popular mistake has arisen on this point, in 
 connection with the expression, "trial by one's peers." 
 This is usually taken to mean "trial by jury." As a matter 
 of fact, it was a phrase used to express' abhorrence of trial 
 by jury, which, at the time when it became prominent, was a 
 very unpopular innovation, introduced by the royal officials. 
 "Trial by peers" really means "trial by the men of one's 
 fief; " and it was a cry of feudalism against the new royal 
 justice. Feudal jurisdiction in private lawsuits for a while 
 reigned, in fact, supreme ; and, even in criminal matters, it 
 succeeded in acquiring some part of the royal jurisdiction. 
 But the kings held on very tight to criminal justice, and 
 preferred to do their local work in such matters by means of 
 subordinate agents, such as the sheriffs, who also gradually 
 took away from the feudal lords much of their jurisdiction in 
 military and revenue matters. Ultimately they also became • 
 too powerful, and were superseded by the itinerant judges 
 (for judicial matters), by Exchequer officials (for revenue), 
 and by royal lieutenants or governors (for military affairs). 
 At least this was so where the State succeeded in stamping 
 ont feudalisni. 
 
 StFuggrle between the State and feudalism.— For 
 it is one of the ironies of history that the State has, in 
 almost all progressive countries, been obliged to enter into 
 a death struggle with a system which it has itself been the 
 main instrument in creating. In some cases it has been 
 successful, in other cases it has succumbed in the task ; but 
 in all cases the struggle has been severe. There were two 
 main objections to feudalism from a political aspect. 
 
 The first of these was its disintegrating character. I<eft
 
 Il8 A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 to itself, feudalism would have split the State in pieces. In 
 fact it did so in some cases, notably in the case of the 
 medieval German Empire, where the great fiefs ultimately 
 became independent States. The reason is not very far to 
 seek. The inhabitants of a feudal district became so accus- 
 tomed to look upon their lord as their earthly providence 
 that they lost sight of the power above him. They assem- 
 bled under his banner, paid their taxes to him, and were 
 judged in his Courts ; they hardly recognized the existence 
 of the State at all. Consequently, if a quarrel arose be- 
 tween their lord and the king, they were quite as likely to 
 support the former as the latter. It was one of the great 
 secrets of the stability of the English throne in the Middle 
 Ages, that the kings very early and very skilfully, the 
 circumstances favouring them, put an end to this kind of 
 thing. They insisted that all military service should be 
 rendered to themselves, and themselves only. They estab- 
 lished a new system of taxation which, while it relieved the 
 feudal lords of a great deal of financial responsibility, 
 deprived them of their former position of tax-gatherers. 
 And, finally (and this is the line we have now to follow), 
 they took away from them the administration of justice. 
 
 In this they were greatly helped by the second objection 
 to feudalism ; viz., its hereditary character. The right to 
 hold a feudal court came to be looked upon as a piece of 
 property, valuable because it yielded a substantial income. 
 When we notice the eagerness of the State to get hold of 
 the administration of justice, we must not suppose that it 
 was entirely, or even principally, because of the desire to 
 supply pure justice to the people. It was mainly due to a 
 desire to secure the profits of jurisdiction. In early times, 
 presidents, judges and officials, as well as advocates and 
 pleaders, were paid hy fees, often, it is to be feared, by 
 bribes. The more business, the more fees. Hence the 
 desire to enlarge jurisdiction. Possibly this competition 
 for the supply of justice would be a good thing if all liti-
 
 THE STATE AND JUSTICE 119 
 
 gants honestly desired the best tribunals. Unfortunately 
 there are always dishonest litigants, who are only too glad 
 to resort to corrupt, ignorant and dilatory tribunals. Still, 
 as a matter of fact, we are bound to admit that the State 
 Justice has, in the end, succeeded in superseding Clan 
 Justice, Feudal Justice, Merchant's Justice, and even Eccle- 
 siastical Justice, because on the whole it has proved itself 
 better than any other. Its superiority has consisted chiefly 
 in three qualities. 
 
 1. StFength. — We have seen that the oldest type of 
 law court, the moot of the elders, was a voluntary tribunal. 
 If the accused party did not choose to attend the summons 
 of his opponent, or to obey the doom of the court, the court 
 could not compel him. It had no executive machinery. 
 Now a voluntary tribunal may be all very well when both 
 parties to a quarrel are perfectly bond fide, and honestly 
 wish to obtain a fair decision. But, in nine cases out of ten, 
 one party is not bo7idfide. He wants to gain time by delay, 
 or fraud, or obstinacy. A voluntary tribunal can do noth- 
 ing with him. But the royal officials would not stand any 
 nonsense. If a litigant would not obey their summons, his 
 goods, and even his land were seized, and, in the last resort, 
 he was put in prison against the day of trial. So likewise 
 with the judgment. If the litigant refused to obey, the 
 judgment was enforced against his property and his person. 
 Of course the feudal tribunals had also, to a limited extent, 
 this coercive power ; but it was the absence of it which 
 really proved the undoing of the tribunals of the clan, the 
 gild and the Church. 
 
 2. Skill. — Again the royal officials, chosen from a wider 
 field and selected exclusively for ability, naturally attained 
 a much higher level of judicial skill than the elders of the 
 moot, chosen mainly for their age, the feudal noble who had 
 inherited his position, or the ecclesiastic chosen for his piety. 
 No doubt the feudal baron and the ecclesiastic had also their 
 officials ; they did not always decide cases in person. But
 
 I20 A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 it is very unlikely that these were as skilful as the king's 
 officials. Roughly speaking, the biggest employer gets the 
 best servants ; and the king was by far the biggest employer 
 of labour in judicial matters. There were many feudal 
 barons and many bishops and archdeacons ; but there was 
 only one king. One very striking evidence of the supe- 
 riority of the royal over the feudal and popular courts in 
 the matter of official skill is the fact that, until compara- 
 tively late in history, the royal courts alone kept records 
 of their proceedings in writing. 
 
 5. Simplicity. — One of the most erroneous notions about 
 primitive judicial procedure is that it is simple a.nd. straight- 
 forward. When it is actually examined, it is found to be 
 full of traps and pitfalls. The parties must use exactly the 
 prescribed forms of words ; a slip or stammer will prove 
 fatal. This is extremely natural when we remember that 
 the oldest form of judicial procedure is a substitute for a 
 fight, and that, in a fight, the object of each man is to catch 
 his opponent tripping. Moreover, the parties must only 
 proceed upon the correct days, or the whole proceedings 
 will be worthless. The story of the Roman augurs, who 
 succeeded in keeping secret the whole of the legal forms and 
 the lists of correct Court days, so that no one dare go to law 
 without consulting them, is thoroughly characteristic of 
 primitive procedure. It is, as the Germans say, emphatically 
 tnit C^a^r ("with risk"). But the royal officials, though 
 they were not free from official pedantry, swept away much 
 of the ancient Abracadabra of legal procedure. They 
 announced openly the days on which they would hold courts, 
 and, upon reasonable payment, issued correct forms. 
 
 Still more did they improve and simplify the actual method 
 of trial. Broadly speaking, after the blood-feud had died 
 out, or had subsided into the trial by combat, the ancient 
 tribunals knew only two other methods of trial. If the 
 accused was respectable, he was allowed to clear himself by 
 his own oathy and that of a prescribed number of his rela-
 
 THE STATE AND JUSTICE 121 
 
 fives, who now swore for him instead of fighting with him. 
 If he was a serf, or a man who bore a bad reputation, he was 
 compelled to submit to the ordeal, e. g., to plunge his arm 
 into boiling water, to walk blindfolded over red-hot plough- 
 shares, or to lift a mass of red-hot iron. If he was injured 
 in the process, he was held guilty ; if he escaped, he was 
 pronounced innocent. As has been well remarked, it is 
 difficult to see how a man could have been convicted by the 
 oath (unless his kinsmen made a slip in the form), or have 
 been acquitted by the ordeal (unless the officials were 
 bribed). In any case, the whole trial was, as we should 
 think , a mere farce. 
 
 The royal officials introduced greatly improved methods. 
 Without entirely discarding the trial by combat, they offered 
 attractive alternatives. For example, they allowed proof of 
 the complainant's accusation or the defendant's denial by 
 record, i. e., by appeal to the written files of the Court itself, 
 or to solemn documents. By this means they indirectly did 
 much to encourage the use of writing in daily transactions. 
 Again, they insisted that certain transactions should be con- 
 ducted before witnesses ; and then the witnesses could, of 
 course, be produced in Court to settle disputes. But their 
 most famous innovation was the trial by jury, or trial con- 
 cluded by the answer given by a small body of neighbors, 
 to a question put to them by a royal official. This famous 
 institution, about which much nonsense has been talked, 
 seems to have been originally a royal privilege, inherited by 
 the Emperor Charles the Great from the decaying Roman 
 Empire, and spread by his officials throughout western 
 Europe. If the Emperor suspected that any of the Imperial 
 rights in any district had been misappropriated, his officials 
 could compel the neighbors to attend and answer on oath any 
 questions put to them concerning it. Needless to say, it was 
 at first an intensely unpopular institution, both with the men 
 who, as we should say, "sat on the jury," and the people 
 whose misdoings were thus revealed. But it suited ad-
 
 122 A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 mirably the purpose of the State, and was taken up by 
 king after king in western Europe. In return for a sub- 
 stantial payment, the kings sold to private litigants the 
 privilege of using it ; but, of course, it could only be used 
 under the presidency of a royal official, for the jury would 
 not obey the summons of any one else. After it had been 
 in use some years for royal business, e. g. , revenue matters 
 and criminal prosecutions, honest litigants began to see the 
 advantage of it, and to employ it extensively. But its 
 originally limited character is shown by the fact that, in 
 criminal cases, it was long before the prisoner could be cofn- 
 pelled io submit to a trial by jury ; and the earliest criminal 
 jury was one of accusation only {grand jury), not of trial. 
 Gradually, however, as people began to see that trial by jury 
 was a preferable alternative to being smuggled out of the 
 way by the royal officials, or being left to languish in prison, 
 or taking their chance amid the pitfalls of feudal procedure 
 or in W\Q. judicial combat, trial by jury became "popular" 
 in the modern sense, and was regarded as a bulwark oj 
 liberty. Unfortunately, in many countries it died out 
 altogether, just because at the critical moment the State 
 (i. e., the king) was too weak to urge its adoption. So it 
 has come to be regarded as a peculiarly English institution. 
 But it was not so originally. 
 
 By these means tlie State succeeded in most progressive 
 countries in getting into its own hands the business of 
 administering justice. We may date this achievement, 
 roughly speaking, by the Reformation, when the struggle 
 with the Church got rid, even in Catholic countries, of the 
 last formidable rival to the State jurisdiction. In some cases 
 the State abolished the local courts altogether and set up 
 new ones of its own. This was what happened in France, 
 and it led to consequences which were disastrous, but which 
 are too technical to explain here. In other cases, notably 
 in England, the State pursued the much easier plan of con- 
 verting the local tribunals into tribunals of its own, thus, to
 
 THE STATE AND JUSTICE 123 
 
 a great extent, preserving that cotitittuity which is so 
 important a factor in political progress. 
 
 We have now to answer the important question, What 
 was the law administered by these various tribunals ? But 
 this question must be reserved for a separate chapter. It 
 involves a treatment Oi the important subject of political 
 representation.
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 The State and Legislation 
 
 As WE have before stated (p. 41), the notion that law 
 could be made was unknown to primitive society. The 
 rudimentary idea of law, as it presented itself to people in 
 the patriarchal stage, was that of a custom or observance, 
 sanctioned by the approval and practice of ancestors. At 
 first this idea, like everything else in patriarchal society, 
 was purely personal ; a man's custom or law was the cus- 
 tom of his tribe or clan. Comparatively late in European 
 history, the rule was gravely admitted that each man was 
 entitled to be judged by the law of his race or folk, no 
 matter where he might be. There is even a faint survival 
 of the notion in civilized countries at the present day. 
 That most persistent of all patriarchal societies, the Jew- 
 ish, retains to a certain extent its tribal law in the Gentile 
 cities of the West. 
 
 But, for the most part, the development of agriculticre, 
 aided by the later development of feudalism, made law 
 a local rather than a personal thing. Instead of the 
 custom of the clan, people began to speak and think of the 
 custom of the village, the custom of the fief, and the cus- 
 tom of the toivn. The personal idea slill lingered ; there 
 was a strong feeling that no one could claim the custom of 
 the village but a villager, of the fief but a vassal, of the 
 town but a burgher. But this element gradually dwindled, 
 as residence took the place r.f blood in the organization of 
 society. 
 
 (124)
 
 THE STATE AND LEGISLATION 125 
 
 It is necessary, however, most carefully to remember 
 that, when we speak of law being local, we do not mean 
 that the same law applied to large areas. If, for example, 
 we were to speak of the law of France, or the Law 0/ 
 Germany, in connection with the tenth century, we should 
 betray great historical ignorance. In the tenth century, 
 every little district, almost every village and town, in 
 France, Germany, Spain, and even in England, had its own 
 special law. In England, for reasons which we are about 
 to point out, this state of things was modified very early ; 
 yet, even in modern England, at this very day, as all law- 
 yers know, there are hundreds of different village laws, 
 or rather niaiiorial, lazus, which, under the name of copy- 
 hold customs, regulate important questions of property. 
 And in France, Germany, Spain and other countries, there 
 was no national law till the end of the last century. 
 
 Three great agencies gradually swept away this (as we 
 should think) intolerable state of affairs, and created the 
 modern system of law and of legislation. 
 
 I. Records. — From the early Middle Ages, and from all 
 parts of Europe, there survive to us a deeply interesting 
 body or collection of codes, folk-laws as they are called, or 
 Leges Barbarorum,. We have them for the Teutonic king- 
 doms of Italy and Spain, for Bavaria, Saxony, Burgundy, 
 Frankland, Swabia, Frisia, England, Wales, Ireland, even 
 (to a slight extent) for Scotland, Denmark, Sweden and 
 Norway, and many other districts. Though their actual 
 dates differ very widely, they nearly all come from the 
 same relative period in the history of each country; viz., 
 the period at which the tribal settlement is first becoming 
 a fixed kingdom, under a conquering king. That is to say, 
 they come from the very earliest days of the State, They 
 are due, almost universally, to one and the same cause ; 
 viz., the desire of the conqueror to know the customs of his 
 conquered subjects. In many cases he has formally 
 promised to respect these customs ; in no case does he pro-
 
 126 A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 pose to sweep them away. But lie must know what they 
 are ; he cannot respect what he does not know. 
 
 And so we see that the so-called Barbarian Codes are 
 not legislation, in the sense of law-making ; but statements 
 or declarations of custom. In nearly all cases, they are 
 drawn up as the result of a formal and careful inquiry 
 amongst those chiefs and elders who are supposed specially 
 to know the customs of their people. ( 
 
 Impoptanee of the step.— Nevertheless, the drawing 
 up of these customs was a momentous event in the history 
 of La'iV. As we have seen (p. 41), unwritten custom docs 
 alter ; but it alters itself automatically and imperceptibly. No 
 one is sacrilegious enough to propose deliberately to alter it. 
 But written custom cannot be altered imperceptibly ; it is 
 always possible to point to the exact text, and show what it 
 says. Nevertheless customs viust alter in a progressive 
 society ; and so it was necessary to have successive editions 
 of the written Codes, as in fact happened. Thus people 
 came gradually to accept the idea that custom could be 
 altered; and occasionally they even allowed the king, by 
 way of bargain or agreement, to introduce certain deliberate 
 alterations. No doubt a good many more alterations were 
 secretly slipped in by the royal scribes who drew up the 
 Codes. We must remember the enormous respect paid in 
 primitive times to the newly discovered art of writing ; a 
 written document was looked upon as a sort of charm or 
 magic power. To say of a rule — "it is written," was to claim 
 for it almost a sacred character. We have all heard of the 
 Hindu who carried a doctor's prescription about on his 
 person, instead of taking it to the apothecary to be made up. 
 That is characteristic of the veneration with which primitive 
 people regard written documents. And so we may very 
 well suppose that, if a passage was found in a written code, 
 no inquiry would be permitted as to how it got there. 
 
 2. Law Courts. — We have seen, in the preceding 
 chapter, how the State gradually acquired the business of
 
 THE STATE AND LEGISLATION 127 
 
 administering y«^//r^. And, in the main, the royal officials, 
 in performing this business, honestly tried to decide cases 
 according to the custom of the place in which they happened 
 to be. But they naturally became confused and impatient 
 with the innumerable petty differences of local custom, and 
 leaned, perhaps unconsciously, in favour of uniformity. 
 Especially was this the case with the itinerant or circuit 
 judges, to whom allusion has been made (p. 117). Being 
 attached to no particular locality, they were free from local 
 prejudice ; and, as they gathered round the royal chair at 
 the end of their journeys, they probably discussed with 
 one another the difficulties of their task, and came to some 
 agreement on general principles. What they probably did 
 was to take some general rule, which represented the 
 average practice of the local communities, and agree to 
 ignore local differences as much as possible. In this way, 
 at any rate, the English common law seems to have been 
 modelled ; it was the law which was common to all the dis- 
 tricts of the kingdom. Where a local custom was very tena- 
 cious, it was allowed to prevail in its particular district. And 
 it is very significant that copyhold customs (p. 125) were not 
 harmonized, because the royal judges did not decide copyhold 
 cases till quite late in history. And the reason why, on the 
 Continent, there was no common law for centuries later than 
 in England, was just because, on the Continent, the State 
 did not get hold of the administration of justice till centuries 
 after it had done so in England. But, to show that the 
 process was not peculiar to England, we may point out that 
 the same result had occurred at a similar stage of Roman 
 history ; where the customs selected and harmonized by the 
 prcetors had become the common law of the mighty Roman 
 Empire. It may be remarked, as a matter of detail, that 
 one of the shrewdest moves by which the English judges 
 pushed their plan of making a common law was by limiting 
 the verdict of the jury in every case to questions of fact. At 
 first the jury used to give answers both on law and fact;
 
 128 A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 and, being a purely local body, they used, of course, to 
 follow local custom. For example, they would be asked : 
 "Who is the heir of A?"; and if they came from a district 
 in which the youngest son succeeded to his father, they 
 would say, "X" (A's youngest son). But later, the judges 
 used to ask them, "Who is A's eldest son?"; which is 
 purely a question of fact. And then the judges used to 
 declare that the eldest son was the heir. Thus, incidentally, 
 we get the famous division between the province of the 
 judge and the province of the jury. 
 
 3. Fictions. — But these two methods, valuable as they 
 were in gradually preparing the public mind for the business 
 of laiv-making, were slow and imperfect processes. So 
 also was another very useful makeshift ; viz., the use of 
 ficHons. If, for example, a rule of custom said that land 
 could not be sold, and A wished to sell his land to B, B 
 used to bring a lawsuit against A, pretending that the land 
 was really his (B's), and that A was keeping him out of it. 
 Acting in collusion, A would make no defence ; and the 
 Court would therefore adjudge that the land belonged to B. 
 The fiction there was that there had been no sale, but a 
 correction of a former mistake. Of course, that is a glaring 
 fiction ; and it could never succeed but for the willingness 
 of the Courts to connive at a change. But it is a well- 
 known fact that people will accept a change under cover of 
 a fiction, which they would spend the last drop of their 
 blood in resisting as an avowed alteration. Turkey will 
 not give up her sovereignty over Crete ; but, if the Turkish 
 flag may fly in Crete as a symbol of Turkish sovereignty, 
 Turkey will withdraw all real control. 
 
 4. Legislation. — But, where progress and development 
 are rapid, new custom is, in fact, being rapidly made every 
 day, and all these makeshifts are inadequate to the task of 
 declaring it. Some more direct and speedy method must 
 be adopted. The answer to the difficulty is found in 
 political representation.
 
 THE STATE AND LEGISLATION 129 
 
 To modem politicians, political representation is a form 
 of agency, a means by which people express their wishes, 
 and elect people to carry them out. About the precise 
 character of the process there are, no doubt, great differ- 
 ences of opinion. One school of politics holds, for example, 
 that the representatives are mere delegates of the electors, 
 morally, if not legally bound to obey their mandate. An- 
 other school takes the view that the elector, in choosing his 
 representative, puts himself entirely in the latter's hands, 
 and leaves him to act as he thinks best. Both agree, how- 
 ever, in regarding an election as an opportunity for the 
 elector to express his choice of a representative. 
 
 But any one who is at all familiar with primitive society 
 is aware that the idea of agency was quite unknown to that 
 stage of history. In primitive society every transaction was 
 apt to end in a fight ; and it was important, therefore, we 
 might even say necessary, that it should be conducted by 
 the parties actually concerned. We must look elsewhere 
 for the beginning of political representation. 
 
 Let us take a totally different line. Primitive society 
 knew nothing ol agency ; but it knew a great deal oi joint 
 liability. A murdered B ; not only A, but A's relatives 
 were liable to the relatives of B. A (a mason) built B's 
 house so badly that it fell down ; not only A, but A's gild 
 was liable to B. A (a merchant) incurred a debt to B. 
 Not only A, but (as we have seen) A's town, was liablg 
 to B. 
 
 The State uses the idea. —When the State was 
 established, it made abundant use of this idea. A man was 
 found dead on the king's highway; the three neighbouring 
 villages had to produce the murderer, or pay the murder- 
 fine. There had been a cattle raid ; and the tracks of the 
 stolen beasts led to a certain village. That village must 
 have produced the thief or paid the fine. There had been a 
 row in a market-place, and the king's flag had been torn 
 down, or his bailiff insulted. The town had to make
 
 130 A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 amends. Or the king had levied a tax ; and the hundred 
 or the town had been assessed at so much. It had to 
 pay. 
 
 Enf opcement of joint liability.— But what if it could 
 not or would not pay ? According to our modern ideas, the 
 liability ought to have been divided proportionately or 
 equally amongst the individual members of the village, or 
 town, or hundred ; and each man ought to have been com- 
 pelled to pay his own share. But this course would have 
 involved endless trouble ; and the king had other things to 
 do. He knew a simpler and more effectual way. He sent 
 his officer, who seized a couple of the wealthiest and most 
 respected inhabitants of the village, or hundred, or town, 
 and clapped them in gaol till the money was paid. The 
 village, no doubt, protested. Very well, let it find the 
 money, and the men would be restored. Brutal, perhaps, 
 but effective. It is done every day in Oriental countries. 
 The result is that the captives are ransomed by their rela- 
 tions and friends, who, by some means or another, have 
 managed to scrape together the money. Incidentally, we 
 may notice that this matter of raising the money does a 
 great deal towards building up what we may call local self - 
 government, in the district affected. But here our chief 
 object is to notice its importance as a step in the growth of 
 political representation. 
 
 Development of the idea. — For we may be very sure 
 that a practice so convenient to the State grew and spread. 
 The State was always wanting money from its subjects on 
 some pretext or another. And so we are not at all sur- 
 prised to find that, quite early in the Middle Ages, and all 
 over Europe, the village headman and elders got into the 
 habit of assembling at the hundred-moot and the county- 
 moot at fixed times in the year, to meet the royal officers, 
 the sheriff or his "junior," and to answer the royal 
 demands. Later on, as towns appeared, we find their head- 
 men and elders doing the like. No doubt on these occa-
 
 THE STATE AND LEGISLATION 131 
 
 sions a good deal of purely local business was discussed ; 
 but we may be very sure that the real thing which kept 
 the practice alive was the presence of the royal officers. 
 Over and over again we find the royal command issued : 
 "Let the shire-moot and the hundred-moot be held as it 
 was aforetime, and let the reeve and four men come," 
 and so on. 
 
 Appearance of Papliament. — Then, somewhere about 
 the end of the twelfth century, a great idea was born in 
 western Europe. Commerce was progressing rapidly ; the 
 value of money was falling. In every country the State 
 was wanting more money. Why not have a great national 
 moot, as well as many little hundred-moots and shire-moots ? 
 And so, all over Europe, in Spain, Sicily, France, Ger- 
 many, Scandinavia, England, Scotland, even Ireland, Parlia' 
 tnents sprang up. But they were not entirely representative, 
 still less were they homogeneous. 
 
 The Nobles. — For, if we turn our thoughts back to the 
 earHest days of the State (Chapter IX), we shall remem- 
 ber that its first organization contained a council of king's 
 followers, originally the comrades who had followed him 
 in his conquest of the kingdom. This council had never 
 died out, but had, on the contrary, been enlarged by the 
 gradual creation of nobles, and by the admission of the 
 great ecclesiastics, the bishops and abbots. In fact, so 
 large had it become that, for ordinary purposes, it was 
 too bulky, and the daily work of the State was done by a 
 smaller body of officials, generally known as the Curia or 
 Court, which was always about the person of the king. 
 But, on solemn occasions, the Great Council of nobles was 
 always summoned, though probably the humbler members 
 did not often attend. So when the kings determined to 
 hold national fnoots, they naturally summoned the members 
 of their Great Councils. 
 
 The Clergy. — In the meantime, a new and very 
 important class of persons had grown up ; viz., the
 
 132 A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 cathedral and parochial clergy. They had amassed great 
 wealth by the gifts of the pious ; it was calculated that 
 something like one-fifth of the land of Christendom was in 
 the hands of the Church. Just at the time of which we are 
 speaking (twelfth and thirteenth centuries) the Church had 
 developed a policy of isolation. Under the guidance of a 
 succession of able Popes, her clergy were withdrawing 
 themselves from secular affairs and becoming a caste apart. 
 They cut themselves of? from domestic life by adopting the 
 rule of celibacy; they refused to plead in the secular courts ; 
 above all, they declined to pay taxes to the State, on the 
 ground that they paid them to the Pope. Now, as the 
 main object of the kings in holding these national moots was 
 to get money, it is quite obvious that they could not afford 
 to let the Church escape. So they insisted on the repre- 
 sentatives of the clergy — the deans, archdeacons and 
 proctors, coming to Parliament. The clergy did not like it ; 
 but in most cases they had to come. 
 
 The smaller landowners.— Then the smaller land- 
 owners were represented. In England this was done fairly 
 enough in one way, but not in another. The sherifT was 
 told to send two people from the county court ; but, instead 
 of sending villagers, he was told to send knights, i. e., 
 landlords. No doubt the villagers were pleased at the 
 time ; but it was a bad thing for them in the long run. In 
 other countries the villagers were often represented by 
 men of their own class. 
 
 The townsmen. — Finally, the sheriflf was told to send 
 people from the towns, burgesses or burghers, as they were 
 called in England ; and thus the medieval Parliament was 
 complete. It represented the estates of the realm; viz., 
 nobles, clergy, yeomen or peasants, and craftsmen. 
 
 But two things about it are well worth noticing. 
 
 (a) It was not, in any ordinary sense of the term, a 
 popular institution. On the other hand, for many years 
 after its appearance, it was intensely unpopular, both with
 
 THE STATE AND LEGISLATION 133 
 
 "constituencies" and representatives. The counties hated 
 it, because they had to pay the wages of their members. 
 The clergy hated it, because they did not want to acknowl- 
 edge the secular authority. The boroughs hated it, because 
 (in England at least) the parliamentary boroughs paid a 
 higher scale of taxation than their humbler sisters. And all 
 hated it, because a Parliament im'ariably meant taxation. 
 The members themselves disliked the odium of consenting 
 to taxes which their constituents would have to pay. Only 
 by the most stringent pressure of the Crown were Parlia- 
 ments maintained during the first century of their existence ; 
 and the best proof of this assertion lies in the fact that, in 
 those countries in which the Crown was weak. Parliament 
 ultimately ceased to assemble. The notion that Parliaments 
 were the result of a spontaneous democratic movement 
 can be held by no one who has studied, ever so slightly, the 
 facts of history. 
 
 [b) Parliament, at any rate the representative part of it, 
 was, in its origin, concerned solely with the granting of 
 money. The nobles were, it is true, hereditary councillors 
 of the Crown ; but the clerical proctors, and the memben 
 for the counties and boroughs, could claim no such position. 
 There was no pretence of such a thing in the early days of 
 Parliament. It was liability, and not privilege, which was 
 the basis of Parliamentary representation ; it was the old 
 idea of the seizure of the village elders, carried out on a 
 magnificent scale. 
 
 New ehapaetep of Papliament. — But it not unfre- 
 quently happens that an institution created for one purpose 
 is found to serve quite another. If the representatives of 
 shires and boroughs might not advise, at any rate they 
 might petition. And petitions come with a strong force 
 from people who are being asked to grant sums of money. 
 As a matter of fact, the members, especially the mem- 
 bers for the shires and boroughs, petitioned loudly and 
 frequently ; and sessions of Parliament very soon began
 
 134 A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 to assume the character of bargainings, in which the 
 king undertook to grant petitions in return for gifts of 
 money. 
 
 But what has all this to do, it may be asked, with legis- 
 lation f Just everything, as we shall now see. 
 
 CharacteP of petitions. — For if any group of petitions 
 presented by a Parliament be examined (in most cases they 
 have been carefully recorded) we shall find that they fall 
 readily into two divisions. One division consists of mere 
 private requests, e. g., that a particular man may have a 
 pension, that a particular oppression by a royal official may 
 be abolished, and so on. These, if granted, only involve an 
 executive or administrative act on the part of the Crown. 
 But the other division consists of complaints of the breach of 
 good and ancient customs, and a request for their confirma- 
 tion. These, if granted, result in declarations, or, we may 
 say if we like, makings of law, i. e., in. legislation. It was 
 already admitted that the Crown had ordaining power. The 
 king, as military commander, could issue any orders which 
 could fairly be deemed necessary for the performance of his 
 universally recognized duties; viz., the defence of the 
 country against foreign attack, and the maintenance of order 
 within. He could order the ports to be closed, forbid the 
 export of precious metals, direct the town watches to be 
 kept and the militia to be maintained, and so on. He could, 
 moreover, make all regulations for the control of his own 
 officials, and for the conduct of proceedings in his own 
 tribunals. All this was inherent in his prerogative; and, in 
 a sense, it may be deemed legislation. But not until the 
 royal enactment was combined with the popular petition was 
 thei^e real effective legislation, law-declaring which aflfected 
 every hole and corner of a man's life, which turned the 
 vague and badly-enforced custom into definite and strictly 
 enforced law. And this, even at the present day, will be 
 found to be the character of almost all successful legislation. 
 It is custom adopted and enforced by the State. A wise
 
 THE STATE AND LEGISLATION 135 
 
 legislator never attempts to devise legislation out of his own 
 head. Having made up his mind that a grievance requires 
 remedying, he makes inquiries, and finds what the better 
 and more enlightened people are spo?iianeousfy doing to 
 remedy it. Then he endeavours to pass a statute com- 
 pelling all people to act up to the standard of the more 
 enlightened class. He does not take the exalted type as his 
 model, knowing that it is useless to legislate "over the 
 heads of the people." But . he does take the "rather 
 superior citizen," and he insists that the inferior people 
 shall toe the line marked by him. At once the proposal 
 receives support from the people who have already sponta- 
 neously adopted it. To the inevitable objection, that "it 
 cannot be done," the answer is obvious, — "but it is already 
 done." And thus the measure escapes the most damaging 
 of all criticisms to a statesman, that it is "unpractical." 
 There is a well known academic moot which inquires, 
 "What are the proper limits of legislative interference?" 
 Somewhere in the direction indicated will be found the 
 practical answer to the problem. For a Government, still 
 more for a private individual, to propose "fancy" legisla- 
 tion, is to proceed upon the entirely unwarranted assumption 
 that the Government's servants, or the private individual, 
 understand the business of the nation better than the nation 
 itself understands it. 
 
 Majorities. — Reverting, in conclusion, to the subject of 
 political representation, we may say something about a 
 feature which has everywhere become identified with it, and 
 without which political representation, as understood at the 
 present day, could not be worked ; viz. , the doctrine of 
 tnajorities. Strange as it may sound to modern ears, it is 
 yet unquestionably true that there was once a time (not so 
 very long ago) when the fact that a proposal was supported 
 by a majority was considered no reason whatever for its 
 acceptance. 
 
 Tliis is the more curious, inasmuch as primitive society
 
 136 A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 was full of ccnnnmnilics, i. e., groups of people having 
 interests in common, and conducting their business in com- 
 mon. Surely, it will be said, these communities must have 
 had some method of settling difTerences of opinion by 
 votes ? No. The answer is, that if custom did not settle 
 the matter, or compromise, then the only remedy was a 
 fight, in which the strongest party got its own way. Una- 
 nimity, or a fight, were the alternatives of primitive times. 
 This is one of the chief reasons why primitive society was 
 so almost stationary for centuries together. 
 
 Originally no competition for post of represen- 
 tative. — We cannot suppose that, in its origin as we have 
 seen it, political representation found any urgent necessity 
 for contested elections. There would hardly be much com- 
 petition for the unpopular part of hostage, or even of 
 member of an early Parliament. Apparently, at first, the 
 royal officials laid hold of those whom they considered to 
 be suitable persons, and packed them off to Parliament. In 
 the boroughs, there are some traces of a rotation of service 
 among the leading burgesses.* 
 
 But, as it began gradually to dawn upon people's minds 
 that, in some countries at least, Parliament was a very 
 powerful institution, and membership thereof a thing to be 
 coveted, contested elections began to make their appearance. 
 In England, by far the best example of early political repre- 
 sentation, there are traces that, at the commencement of the 
 fifteenth century (when Parliament was about two hundred 
 years old), people were beginning to covet the position of 
 member of the Commons House. The old idea of the 
 unwilling hostage had died out. The new idea of agency, 
 introduced, perhaps, from the Roman Law by means of the 
 Church, was offering a more satisfactory explanation of the 
 position of the parliamentary representative. He was the 
 agent of his constituency, therefore his constituents had a 
 
 ♦This practice survived until quite late in the history of Spain.
 
 THE STATE AND LEGISLATION 137 
 
 right to choose him. But how if they disagreed ? The ques- 
 tion evidently caused great difficulties ; and though, unhap- 
 pily, as in so many really interesting matters of history, 
 precise evidence is wanting, we can make a shrewd guess as 
 to what happened. 
 
 Election fights. — Most people, probably, have noticed 
 that the language of elections is somewhat bloodthirsty. 
 We speak of the "party war-chest," the "election cam- 
 paign," the "enemy's stronghold," "laying siege to a 
 constituency," "leading troops to victory," "carrying the 
 war into an opponent's territorjr," and so on. Much of this 
 is no doubt, the decorative language of the New Jour- 
 nalism ; but it is interesting to find that the further back we 
 go in history, the more nearly does it tally with the actual 
 facts. It is one of the numerous examples of the survival, 
 in language, of practices which have passed away in reality. 
 Most things in the Middle Ages ended in a fight. The con- 
 tested election was no exception. The victorious party 
 routed its opponents, drove them from the hustings, and 
 carried their man, i. e., to the sheriff, who forthwith 
 recorded his name, and sent it up to the Clerk of the 
 Crown. 
 
 Fictions. — But fighting, though it has its charms, has 
 also its drawbacks, especially when a royal official is stand- 
 ing by, who may inflict fines for breach of the peace. And 
 so it would appear that a fiction was gradually adopted, by 
 which it was assumed that there had been a fight, and that 
 one party had gained the victory. 
 
 But which party ? Well, other things being equal, in any 
 fight the more numerous party will win. And so it seems 
 to have gradually become the custom, where party feeling 
 was not very strong, to settle the matter by coujiting heads 
 instead of breaking them. Much of the machinery of voting 
 recalls its origin. The first test is a shout. If one party 
 greatly preponderates, its shouts will drown the other's, and 
 there will be no need to go further. But the shout is the
 
 138 A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 old battle-cry. If there is still doubt, the next step is Divide^ 
 i. e., draw up in battle array. We do not allow this in par- 
 liamentary elections, because the temptation to resort to the 
 ancient method would be too great. But, in calmer assem- 
 blies, it is the regular procedure. 
 
 Parties. — Thus we see what a rough test the verdict of 
 the majority is. It is not based, historically, on any ethical 
 considerations. It makes no allowance for difference of 
 merit in the combatants, or for generalship, both of which 
 tell in real warfare. But it is a very simple and enormously 
 useful practical way of settling disputes, and it has had a 
 world-wide success. Curiously enough, it has often been 
 reckoned the child of its own offspring. It is usually said 
 that it is the logical result of the equality of Man. Histori- 
 cally speaking, the dogma of the equality of Man is the 
 result of the adoption of the purely practical machinery of 
 the majority. But the adoption of the majority principle is 
 also responsible for another famous institution of modern 
 politics — \h^ party system. 'Y'^^ party system is an elabo- 
 rate piece of machinery, designed to secure that whenever 
 an opportunity for a vote occurs there shall always be two 
 opposing forces, at least, in existence to contest it. Its 
 chief advantages are that it makes representative institu- 
 tions something of a reality, by interesting a large number 
 of people in politics, that it provides an effective criticism of 
 the existing government, that it affords a scope for the 
 energies and an outlet for the ambition of a large number 
 of wealthy and educated men, and that it guarantees a cer- 
 tain consistency in policy. 
 
 These three institutions — political repi-esentation, verdict 
 of the majority, and the party system — are the mainsprings 
 of modern political machinery. They can be and are equally 
 applied to central and to local government; and, by their 
 adaptability to all kinds of purposes, they are rapidly 
 becoming looked upon as ends in themselves, rather than as 
 machinery for the achievement of ends. It is hardly neces-
 
 THE STATE AND LEGISLATION 139 
 
 sary to point out that the best machine in the world will 
 not produce good results unless good material is put into 
 it ; and this historical account of the appearance of modem 
 political institutions may possibly be of service in placing 
 them in their true perspective.
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 The State and Administration 
 
 Difficulty of ttie subject. — We come now to the last, 
 and by far the most difficult department of State activity. 
 For whilst, in other departments, such as the dispensing of 
 Justice and the making and enforcing of Law^ the victory of 
 the State has been complete, and, with rare exceptions, has 
 become popular, this is by no means the case with regard to 
 that wide department which we call administralion. Very 
 few persons now seriously argue that private law courts or 
 private legislative bodies would be advantageous. But very 
 many people do most strenuously argue that State interfer- 
 ence with the management of domestic, religious and indus- 
 trial affairs is thoroughly mischievous, and ought to be 
 reduced to a minimum. In order, therefore, to avoid all 
 appearance of dogmatism, this chapter will be confined, 
 almost entirely, to a very brief sketch of the process by 
 which the State has actually acquired its present adnain- 
 istrative position. 
 
 Original eharaetep of the State. —Once more we 
 must call to mind the initial fact that the State was, in its 
 origin, a milita?y organization. For many years after its 
 establishment it consisted of a comparatively small body of 
 warriors and officials, under the headship of a king, con- 
 trolling by force a much larger mass of people who inhab- 
 ited a definite territory. It was only by slow degrees, and 
 as the result of various agencies, that the State incorporated 
 into itself, mainly, as we have seen, by the process of 
 
 (140) 
 
 \
 
 THE STATE AND ADMINISTRATION 141 
 
 political representation, the people whom at one time it 
 merely governed. For no one can be properly said to be a 
 member of the State unless he has some voice in the direc- 
 tion of its policy. 
 
 Also, as we have seen, the State started upon its career 
 with the primary function of maintaining external peace and 
 internal order. Quite naturally, its first efforts in the direc- 
 tion of adniinistration were intimately connected with this 
 function. It had no decent pretence for interfering in the 
 lives of its subjects, except with the object of performing it. 
 
 Means of communication.— To this fact we may 
 undoubtedly attribute the early activity of the State in de- 
 veloping the means of communication. The "king's high- 
 way" is now regarded mainly as a convenience for public 
 traffic ; but, historically, it was laid down and maintained for 
 the convenience of the royal armies. In the days in which 
 commercial intercourse between one part of the kingdom and 
 another was almost non-existent, the costly convenience of 
 great trunk roads would certainly never have been undertaken 
 as a commercial speculation. But roads were simply in- 
 valuable to a king who wished to move his army about ; and 
 they were always carefully maintained and protected by 
 well-governed States. A similar care was bestowed upon 
 the great bridges, which are, of course, merely highways 
 across rivers. It is one of the strongest proofs of the reality 
 of local government in England, that the care of the main 
 roads and bridges is entrusted to local authorities. In almost 
 all other countries the State jealously maintains its immedi- 
 ate control. 
 
 Posts. — The same ideas have been at work, though with 
 a modified force, in the later developments of communication. 
 The earliests posts were royal messengers ; and although in 
 England railways * are not administered by the State, they 
 
 *Is not this largely because England is a naval rather than a military 
 power?
 
 142 A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 frequently are so administered on the Continent ; and there 
 can be little doubt that motives of military efficiency largely 
 influence their administration. Finally, it may be observed 
 that land and ocean telegraphic connection is, in the majority 
 of cases, intimately connected with State control. 
 
 Police. — On its internal side, the State's original function 
 of maintaining order very early gave rise to a great develop- 
 ment of what is generally known as police administration. 
 Looked at from one point of view, this may be considered as 
 a branch of the dispensation of Justice, which, as we have 
 seen, ultimately became the exclusive function of the State. 
 But, on its preventive side, police jurisdiction has a special 
 character of its own, which distinguishes it from ordinary 
 judicial work. In the curfew* of William the Conqueror, in 
 the enforcement of the watch, and the maintenance of the 
 tithings or peace-associations, the State, in England at least, 
 showed very early that it realized the importance of prevent- 
 ing as well as punishing disorder. The State regulation of 
 markets and fairs, the many galling restrictions on the har- 
 bouring of strangers, and the stringent regulations on the 
 subject of inns, were amongst the earliest developments of 
 State police administration. On the Continent, as is well 
 known, this preventive policy expanded to an enormous 
 extent, and was made the excuse for all kinds of wanton 
 State interference. In England it was wisely left, to a great 
 extent, to local authorities; the work of the central govern- 
 ment being mainly of a controlling or supervising character. 
 
 Revenue. — Ne.xt to the maintenance of safety and order, 
 the State in early days was, as we have seen, mainly con- 
 cerned with questions of revenue. To its desire to foster and 
 develop this important interest we must undoubtedly 
 attribute many activities of the early State, which, superficially 
 examined, look like vague attempts at philanthropy, or 
 
 ♦The pious theory of our school histories, that King William laid 
 down his curfew rule to prevent his subjects incurring the risk of fires, 
 must be taken with a genial cynicism.
 
 THE STATE AND ADMINISTRATION 143 
 
 ' ' State-socialism ' ' in the modern sense. To this desire, for 
 example, we may attribute many early ordinances on the 
 subject of weights and tneasures, prices, qualities, and es- 
 pecially coinage. When the income of the State was paid in 
 kind, it was extremely important that a standard of measure 
 and value should be generally accepted. The royal officials 
 found themselves hampered at every turn by the numberless 
 petty local and customary differences on these subjects. 
 And so, to render its accounts easier, the State insisted upon 
 certain standards being adopted, and punished any attempt 
 to revert to the old customary methods. When the revenue 
 of the State came to be paid in coin, the necessity for unifor- 
 mity was still more obvious. And so the State, not without 
 some severe struggles, managed to acquire a nio7iopoly of 
 coinage. The great convenience to the public of the State's 
 action in these matters is now universally recognized ; but it 
 was not the original motive of the State's policy. 
 
 Jealousy. — A third and very powerful motive for the 
 active interference of the State in administrative matters was, 
 undoubtedly, that jealotcsy of rivals which affects institutions 
 no less than individuals. The State is, no doubt, an institu- 
 tion, but it is an institution composed of or at least worked 
 by human beings. There is, therefore, nothing absurd in 
 attributing to it human passions. We have already seen, in 
 dealing with the development of property (Chapter X), how 
 the action of the State led to the dissolution of the village 
 community on its proprietary side. On its personal side, as 
 a group of dependents upon a lord, the State was powerfully 
 helped by a great catastrophe which fell upon Europe in the 
 fourteenth century. This was the Plague, or Black Death, 
 as it is often called, which is calculated, in England alone, to 
 have swept away from one-half to one-third of the popula- 
 tion. The blow fell heaviest upon the labouring classes, and 
 was followed immediately by a great scarcity of labotir. 
 This scarcity made itself felt principally in the agricultural 
 districts, because the surviving agricultural labourers rushed
 
 144 A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 to fill the places of the dead craftsmen in the towns. So 
 great was the despair of the land-owners that they appealed 
 to the State for aid ; and the State, not unwilling to inter- 
 vene, issued stringent regulations, compelling all people of 
 the labouring classes to work on the old terms. From that 
 time the State has always been obliged to regard the regula- 
 tion of labour as part of its functions. The immediate effect 
 of the step was, virtually, to dissolve the old labour bond of 
 serfdom, and substitute for it the regulation of labour by the 
 State's officials. It is true that these latter were, in many 
 cases, the old feudal lords in a new guise ; and so serfdom 
 was, in fact, a long time in dying out. And, of course, the 
 interference of the State could not really afTect the economic 
 position of the labourer ; that was, and is, always fixed by 
 economic causes. But it altered his legal position. 
 
 The gild. — Precisely the same policy was adopted, some- 
 what later, with regard to urban labour. No doubt the 
 gilds also suffered severely by the Black Death. But they 
 had more vitality than the villages, and it seems to have 
 been the great geographical discoveries of the fifteenth and 
 sixteenth centuries which dealt them their death blow. In 
 the wake of the great discoveries came great commercial 
 ventures, quite beyond the power of the old gilds to manage. 
 There sprang up a new class of merchants, who despised the 
 petty restrictions and ambitions of the gild-system, so far as 
 they hampered their own plans, though they were quite 
 willing to accept similar privileges themselves for the new 
 trading cmnpanies which they formed. Then, too, the old 
 gilds were, as we have seen, a good deal mixed up with 
 Roman Catholicism ; and this fact, in Protestant countries, 
 went greatly against them. Ultimately, the old gilds were 
 dissolved by the State, which then found itself compelled to 
 lay down certain rules for the control of artisan labour, and 
 to enforce them by its own officials. In both cases we see 
 the invariable policy of the State — to break down all inter- 
 mediate authorities, and to deal directly with the individual.
 
 THE STATE AND ADMINISTRATION 145 
 
 One of the most striking examples of this policy has been, 
 of course, the dissolution of the East India Company, which, 
 so long as its trade monopoly lasted, was simply a gigantic 
 mercantile gild. The same policy was manifest in the de- 
 termined hostility displayed by the State towards the modern 
 labour associations, known as Trade Unions, which date 
 from about the end of the last century'. And, had it not been 
 for the strong reaction against State interference, brought 
 about, not only in England but on the Continent, mainly by 
 Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations," it is not unHkely that 
 the policy would have been once more carried out. As it is, 
 the State is now very much inclined to wash its hands of a 
 difficult problem by proclaiming its neutrality in industrial 
 matters. But, unfortunately for itself, it has raised a spectre 
 by its destruction of the old labour organizations ; and it 
 must face the consequences of its policy. 
 
 The Poop Law. — Incidentally, also, its action sowed 
 the seed ot the great problem of pauperism, or State relief 
 of the indigent. The State, of course, did not create 
 poverty ; but, by its destruction of the chief agencies, the 
 village system, the monasteries, and the gilds which dealt 
 with it, the State practically assumed responsibility for its 
 treatment. It is a responsibility which, by reason of its far- 
 reaching consequences, the State has always been reluctant 
 to undertake. In nearly all cases the actual administration 
 of the Poor Law, where it exists at all, is placed by it in the 
 hands of local authorities, the action of the central govern- 
 ment being confined to supervision and criticism. This is, 
 unquestionably, the wisest policy on many grounds ; for Poor 
 Relief is just one of those matters in which, if corruption and 
 hypocrisy are not to be allowed to prevail, minute local 
 knowledge is absolutely essential. The dangers which are 
 attendant even on a local system of Poor Relief were, how- 
 ever, well illustrated by the appalling condition of affairs 
 which prevailed in England during the half century which 
 ended with the appearance of the Reformed Parliament of
 
 146 A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 1832. The great Poor Law Report of 1834 showed that, 
 under cover of the Poor Law system, a scheme of com- 
 viu?tism, of the most degraded and vicious type, had practi- 
 cally established itself in the rural districts of England. It is 
 very significant that, in newly-developed countries, such as 
 the colonies of the British Empire, the State has, almost 
 without exception, declined to undertake responsibility for 
 the relief of poverty. And this is the more striking when 
 we consider the political influence of the poorer classes in 
 those countries, and their leanings towards "State-social- 
 ism." 
 
 Sudden calamity. — Once more it may be pointed out 
 that the occurrence of any sudden and overwhelming calamity 
 has always, at any rate since the great power of the State has 
 been generally recognized, been followed by a great increase 
 of administrative activity. It is, of course, perfectly natural 
 that at such a crisis men's minds should turn instinctively 
 for help to the most powerful agency with which they are 
 familiar, regardless of ultimate consequences. And the more 
 able and efficient the government of the State is, the more 
 readily will its assistance be invoked. The story is the same, 
 from the days of the Plague of the fourteenth century to 
 those of the cholera in the nineteenth. A pestilence, a 
 famine, a great fire, a murrain of beasts, a flood, a tempest ; 
 paralysis of private effort ; application of State aid, followed 
 by permanent organization of State machinery to deal with 
 similar matters in the future. One of the best examples is, 
 of course, the vast and complicated machinery of the Public 
 Health department in England, which has rapidly gjown up 
 as the result of the cholera visitations in the middle of the 
 present century. 
 
 New aspect of State administpation.— It should, 
 however, be pointed out that the question of State adminis- 
 tration has received an altogether new character from the 
 great modem development of political representation. When 
 the State consisted entirely of a handful of officials and
 
 THE STATE AND ADMINISTRATION 147 
 
 privileged landowners, who had sprung from official ranks, 
 an increase of its administrative activity really meant the 
 extension of interference by this limited class with the daily 
 lives of the vast masses of men whom it governed. More- 
 over, it was an interference which, however good its motives, 
 almost inevitably suffered from want of detailed knowledge 
 of the circumstances of those whom it was supposed to 
 benefit. Now that the State includes within its ranks a veiy 
 large proportion of the inhabitants of its territory, now that 
 the average man can make his voice effectively heard b^ 
 means of elections and newspapers, the danger of arbitrary 
 and ignorant interference by the State is very greatly re- 
 duced. It is, no doubt, a reflection of this kind which has 
 rendered the increase of State activity so popular, in com- 
 munities in which the average man can make his power felt. 
 In such communities it is, in fact, often said that the State is 
 merely the nation organized for governmental purposes, and, 
 therefore, that its action is harmless. Although this view is, 
 no doubt, founded on an important truth, it contains by im- 
 plication certain fallacies which, as a final word, it may be 
 well to point out. It would be the worst kind of pedantry 
 to attempt to lay down any hard and fast lines for the limits 
 of State administration. But an honest recognition of the 
 dangers attending it will serve as a useful guide to the citizen 
 in making up his mind on any particular proposal. 
 
 Fallacies in the apgument.— In the first place, even 
 in modem conditions, the State and the nation never are 
 identical. Even where the so-called "universal suffrage" 
 prevails, the parliamentary franchise is not (with rare excep- 
 tions) exercised by women ; and where, as in New Zealand, 
 some women have the franchise, there are yet many inhabi- 
 tants of the country who take no direct part in the business of 
 government. It may be said, of course, that in such countries 
 all persons have the franchise who are fit to use it •, but tha 
 is to beg a very large question. The fact remains that, even 
 in the countries of so-called "universal suffrage," an exten-
 
 148 A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 sion of State administration means an increased interference 
 by some persons with other j^ersons' freedom of action. In 
 countries, such as England and Italy, in which the parlia- 
 mentary franchise is on a more restricted basis, the same 
 truth applies with still greater force. 
 
 Again, even if we are to admit that State and nation are 
 identical, we should still be very far from admitting that 
 State interference, especially in administrative matters, is 
 necessarily a good thing. Legislation, indeed, especially if it 
 follows the policy of adopting and enforcing the practice of 
 the most enlightened members of the community, stands on a 
 somewhat diflferent footing. For in ordinary legislation the 
 citizen is merely given general directions, and left to follow 
 them out at his own risk ; whilst administrative activity not 
 only gives him directions, but stands over him to see that he 
 obeys them. In other words, legislation treats him as a man, 
 administration, as a child. Yet, even in legislative matters, 
 it might be well to allow the process of improvement to work 
 by example, rather than by precept. 
 
 And, in administration, there can be little doubt that the 
 constant supervision and guidance of the individual by the 
 State tends to produce a somewhat feeble type of citizenship, 
 which is constantly looking for directions, instead of casting 
 about to help itself. This fact is very observable in the 
 much-governed countries of continental Europe ; but it is 
 also noteworthy in some countries which should have in- 
 herited a healthier tradition of independence, such as the 
 Australian colonies. 
 
 Finally, the modem indiscriminate advocacy of State 
 administration conceals the fallacy that State officials must 
 necessarily prove more effective in their action than private 
 enterprise. In some respects, no doubt, there is ground for 
 this view-. The private individual naturally shrinks from 
 rebuking practices which he knows to be harmful to the 
 community, even when they are contrary to express law. In 
 well governed communities, the public official has, of course,
 
 THE STATE AND ADMINISTRATION 149 
 
 no such scruples. Moreover, in its higher ranks, the body 
 of State servants usually contains a majority of men of genuine 
 public spirit of great ability, and of special training. The 
 dignity of their position is sufficient to compensate them for 
 the loss of that stimulus which^ to human nature as we know 
 it, is usually best supplied by the hope of personal profit, to 
 be derived from hard work and ability. But, in the lower 
 ranks of the State service, the force of these considerations 
 diminishes rapidly, especially if the area of the State's opera- 
 tions be very large. The State has to compete with private 
 employers of labour, who can, perhaps, afford to offer more 
 tempting rewards. The State has not the same apparent 
 interest in detecting laziness and inefficiency as the private 
 employer ; nor has it, as a rule, the same facilities. It is 
 bound to move according to established routine ; it is often 
 tempted to stifle inquiries for the sake of avoiding scandals ; 
 it is peculiarly subject to pressure by outside influences. The 
 head of an administrative department is often obliged to allow, 
 among his subordinates, conduct which he would not for one 
 moment tolerate in the management of his own estate or his 
 own business. Add to this the unpleasant fact that the 
 State, for various reasons, cannot, in many cases, even 
 promise security of tenure to its minor officials ; and it be- 
 comes obvious that the attractions of the State service to a 
 really desirable class of men are very small. The result is 
 that minor State officials are, in too many cases (though 
 there are numerous honourable exceptions), lazy, stupid, or 
 corrupt, and, therefore, inefficient. In other words, plans for 
 the unlimited extension of State administration stand between 
 the horns of an awkard dilemma. It will not be safe to carry 
 them out until the progress of education and morality has 
 produced an unlimited supply of men and women who are 
 capable of discharging important official duties with great 
 efficiency and absolute honesty, for comparatively small 
 reward. And, when such a supply has been created, the 
 extension of State Interference will no longer be needed.
 
 I50 A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 Once more it must be admitted that to dogmatize upon 
 the proper limits of State interference would be pedantry of 
 the worst type. But it will probably also be admitted by 
 careful observers that no proposal for its extension should 
 be entertained, except in cases of urgent necessity, in which 
 the object to be attained is of more importance than the 
 method of its attainment, in which uniformity is of greater 
 value than originality, and in which it is morally certain 
 that tlie action of the State will be more effectual than 
 private enterprise. 
 
 1
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 Varieties of Political Society 
 
 Ancient classification of States. — Until a few years 
 ago, it was considered almost essential to begin every dis- 
 cussion on Politics witii a mention of the celebrated theme 
 of Aristotle, which classified States into Monarchies, Aris- 
 tocracies, and Democracies or Polities. One of the surest 
 signs that our knowledge of the History of Politics has 
 greatly advanced within the last few years is the fact that 
 this once famous classification has sunk into oblivion. It is 
 neither exhaustive nor, whatever it may have been in 
 Aristotle's day, is it very important. Still more silent has 
 fallen the once noisy controversy as to the respective merits 
 of these three forms of government. Slowly, but surely, 
 people are coming to the wise conclusion that no form of 
 government can be said to be absolutely the best ; and that, 
 in each case, that is the best which is most suited to the 
 circumstances of the case. 
 
 Similarity of principle In all States.— As a matter 
 of fact, all communities in the purely political stage will be 
 found to be varieties of a single type, the type, namely, 
 which is distinguished by the possession of sovereignty. 
 Somewhere or another, in all communities of this type, there 
 resides an authority which, in the last resort, controls abso- 
 lutely and beyond appeal the actions of every individual 
 member of the community. No doubt, as has been well 
 pointed out, this sovereign power recognizes certain moral 
 limitations of its action ; it proceeds, in fact, at the risk of 
 
 (151)
 
 152 A SHORT HISTORY OP POLITICS 
 
 revolution. But, so far as law is concerned, it acknowl- 
 edges no superior and no limit. This condition of afifairs 
 has, no doubt, its drawbacks ; it has also immense advan- 
 tages. Its great practical convenience may be judged from 
 the fact that it is the type of government in all the Great 
 Powers of the modern world, with the possible exception of 
 the United States of America. 
 
 Varieties of organization. — But, within these limits, 
 sovereignty may be organized in different ways. It may be 
 vested (in theory at least) in the hands of a single indi- 
 vidual, as, for example, in Russia. Or it may be vested, 
 and this is by far the commoner case, in a number of indi- 
 viduals or bodies, as in the Crown, Lords and Commons, in 
 the British Empire. As this latter arrangement always 
 gives rise to a good many elaborate rules concerning the 
 relationship between the different individuals or bodies 
 composing the sovereign pozuer, it has received the name of 
 constitutional government, while the sovereignty vested in 
 a single individual receives the name of autocratic govern- 
 tnent. But we must be careful to remember that, owing to 
 political passions, these names have received tnoral as well 
 as scientific meanings. By autocratic rule, many people 
 mean arbitrary or capricious rule ; by constitutional gov- 
 ernment, they mean mild or good government. Of course 
 the government of a numerous body may be, and often is, 
 just as arbitrary and capricious as the rule of a single indi- 
 vidual ; and vice versd. Needless to say, the proportions 
 in which sovereign power is divided among the different 
 members of a sovereign body varies almost infinitely with 
 each case. And so also do the methods by which the 
 various members are selected. Sometimes the executive 
 and legislative powers are quite distinct, as in the German 
 Empire, and, virtually, in Austria ; sometimes they are com- 
 bined, as in England. Sometimes the law courts are 
 beyond the control of the legislature, as in the United 
 States of America ; sometimes they are, legally at least,
 
 VARIETIES OF POLITICAL SOCIETY 153 
 
 subject to its control, as, again, in the British Empire. 
 Again, the head of the State may be hereditary or elective, 
 and this independently of the extent of his powers. The 
 German Emperor, with very great power, is hereditary; the 
 President of the United States, also with great power, is 
 elective. The King of the Netherlands, who has very 
 little power, is hereditary; the President of the French 
 Republic, also with small power, is elective. 
 
 Another, and almost equally important, variation of sov- 
 ereignties is, that some are what we may call ordinary, 
 others extraordinary. That is to say, in some States the 
 sovereign authority is in constant action, or at least always 
 ready to act ; in others it requires an elaborate machinery 
 to set it in motion. The British Empire is the best modem 
 example of the former class; there the powers of the 
 ordinary legislature are unlimited. Such was also the posi- 
 tion of most of the European governments at the close of 
 the last century. But this kind of sovereignty has grown 
 much out of favour in the last hundred years ; and the ma- 
 jority of the ordinary legislatures of Europe do not now 
 wield sovereign powers. Thus, for example, the ordinary 
 legislatures of Spain, Belgium, Holland and many of the 
 German States, cannot go beyond the terms of written 
 documents which place limits to their powers, and which 
 are known as their constitutions. If any further powers are 
 required, they must be sought from some extraordinary 
 authority, such as a vote of the whole electors or inhab- 
 itants. This fact, which is extremely important, gives rise 
 to the distinction between fundamental and ordinary laws ; 
 the former being those which cannot be passed or altered 
 by the ordinary legislature, the latter, those which can. 
 This distinction has been aptly expressed by Mr. James 
 Bryce, as the distinction between rigid and flexible consti- 
 tutions. It is closely, though not inevitably, connected 
 with the division of constitutions into written and unwritten. 
 The written constitution is nearly always rigid; because its
 
 154 A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 framers do not really believe that it ever will require altera- 
 tion. The unwritten constitution, which has grown rather 
 than been made, is nearly always flexible, i. e. , it can be 
 altered by the ordinary legislature.* This is just one of 
 those cases in which the doctrine, that the circumstances of 
 the case must determine the form of government, is most 
 applicable. It would be an absurd piece of academic folly 
 for a country like England, which has flourished for centu- 
 ries with an unwritten constitution, to attempt to reduce her 
 constitution to writing. But the circumstances under which 
 most of the existing constitutions of Europe came into 
 existence rendered written documents essential. Oddly 
 enough, however, England did set the fashion of written 
 constitutions, during the Civil War. After the Restoration, 
 England abandoned them ; but they were taken up by the 
 United States of America when the latter achieved their 
 independence ; from America they passed to France, and 
 from France, after the French Revolution, to the rest of 
 Europe, and, ultimately, to the European colonies. 
 
 Value of local government. —The last distinction in 
 point of form which we need point out is the important 
 distinction between centralized and localized States. This 
 is a distinction which is nearly always to be accounted for 
 by the circumtances of history; but its practical importance 
 is none the less on that account. Beginning with the highly 
 centralized States, we may notice that they correspond 
 closely with those States which have been formed by the 
 gradual conquest by one ruler over a group of surrounding 
 rulers, whose independence he has desired to crush. Thus, 
 modem France was formed by the victory of the kings at 
 Paris in a struggle, long and profound, with the rulers of the 
 neighbouring fiefs — Burgundy, Champagne, Blois, Acqui- 
 
 *Italy seems to be the most'iniportant exception. The constitution 
 (Statuto) is written, but can be altered by the ordinary legislature. 
 Austria and France seem to been the border line; but their constitu- 
 tions are only partly written.
 
 VARIETIES OF POLITICAL SOCIETY 155 
 
 taine, Gascony, Toulouse, Brittany, etc. ; and France is the 
 best example of a highly centralized country. That is to 
 say, the central government at Paris really controls even 
 petty local affairs throughout France, leaving practically no 
 independence to the so-called local authorities. Very much 
 the same is the case in Italy, where the State was formed by 
 the gradual victory of the House of Sardinia over the 
 neighbouring principalities, although, as the struggle was 
 very much less severe in that case, the centralization of 
 Italy is, perhaps, largely to be accounted for by the influence 
 of French models. On the other hand, a State which was 
 formed suddenly by the conquest of a foreign ruler, or in 
 which a long-established government has produced a real 
 fusion of the population, there is generally a considerable 
 allowance of genuine local independence. That is to say, 
 the local authorities are genuinely chosen by the people 
 whom they have to govern ; they are not bound at every 
 step to seek instructions from the central government ; and, 
 so long as they act within their legal powers, they cannot be 
 interfered with by the central authorities. The best kind of 
 all local government is that which is based upon ancient 
 popular divisions, such as England, where the local units, to 
 a greater or less extent, represent natural lines of race and 
 settlement. It is hardly necessary to enlarge on the merits 
 of local government. It stimulates and keeps alive political 
 life in a way that central government alone can never do ; it 
 trains independent politicians for the service of the State ; it 
 prevents the establishment of that dead level of administra- 
 tive uniformity which is the ideal of a central bureaucracy ; 
 and it relieves the central government of an immense 
 amount of routine duty, which the latter could not perform 
 satisfactorily. Its weak points are equally apparent. It is 
 apt to be narrow-minded, ignorant and selfish ; the small- 
 ness of its interests may fail to attract men of the best type, 
 and so it may become very inefficient. But these dangers 
 may be guarded against by the criticism of the central
 
 156 A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 government, a task which the latter is admirably qualified 
 to perform, by reason of its wider outlook and greater 
 experience. 
 
 Composite States. — Of late years, the distinction be- 
 tween centi aliiced and localized States has taken a still more 
 important shape, about which something must also be said. 
 The really striking feature of the last century of politics has 
 been the establishment of federal States. The way had 
 been prepared by Switzerland, which has the distinguished 
 honour of being the first country to introduce the new type 
 of government to the modern world. Switzerland was 
 followed by the United States of America in 1777, by the 
 series of experiments which culminated in the Empire of 
 Germany in 1870, and by the Dominion of Canada in 1867; 
 while, at the present day, we are deeply interested in 
 watching the success of another federal experiment in 
 Australia. 
 
 Introduces a New Ppineiple. — To the historian of 
 Politics, the vital interest of the new tendency lies in the 
 fact that it is the introduction of a new principle into the 
 organization of society, the principle of agreenietit or con- 
 tract. No doubt there have been other influetices at work in 
 the formation of federations. The military preponderance 
 of Prussia, for example, brought the German Empire into 
 existence; and the Imperial authority of Great Britain urged 
 the Canadian provinces to unite. And so the German 
 Empire and the Federal Dominion are hardly ideal speci- 
 mens of federation. But the foundation of Switzerland, and 
 the United States of America, were, and (if it takes place) 
 the union of the Australian colonies will be, purely volun- 
 tary. Lawyers know that the contract is a somewhat late 
 development in legal systems. Primitive societies do not 
 recognize it, or recognize it but feebly. Perhaps the institu- 
 tion of contract is going to play as great a part in politics as 
 it has played in law. 
 
 Nature of Federation. — Meantime, we may notice
 
 VARIETIES OF POLITICAL SOCIETY 157 
 
 that a federation takes place when a number of States hitherto 
 independent of each other (though perhaps dependent on a 
 higher power) desire union, but not unity. They are wiUing 
 to join together for a greater or less number of purposes; 
 but each of them desires to preserve its individual existence, 
 so far as this is consistent with common action. The terms 
 of federal unions are in no two cases alike ; but, putting 
 aside the cases of so-called personal unions* where two 
 States become, as it were, accidentally connected by dynastic 
 ties, we may usefully classify them under the following 
 heads, beginning with the lowest and proceeding to the 
 highest degree of union. 
 
 1. Real Unions. — These occur where two States agree 
 to accept permanently the same ruler, whilst retaining almost 
 intact their independent existence. The most conspicuous 
 example in modern politics is the case of Sweden and 
 Norway ; where the King of Sweden is, ipso jure, also King 
 of Norway, but where Norway retains her independent Par- 
 liament and local institutions, and even (it would now seem) 
 her independent foreign relations. The Act of Union of 1707 
 converted the existing personal or dynastic union of England 
 and Scotland into a real union, of a somewhat closer type 
 than Sweden-Norway, for the Parliaments of the two cen- 
 turies were united, as well as their thrones. 
 
 2. Confederations. — This, at one time a rather favourite 
 type of union, is now virtually discarded by civilized coun- 
 tries, with, perhaps, one striking exception. It occurs when 
 two or more States join together, and delegate, either per- 
 manently or for a limited time, a limited number of their 
 inherent powers to a central authority, but without in any 
 way merging their identity. The powers delegated are 
 usually only of a legislative and military character ; the 
 execution and administration of the laws of the central 
 authority are left to the officials of the different States in their 
 
 •Such, for example, as England and Hannover from 1714 to 1827.
 
 158 A SHORT HISTROY OF POLITICS 
 
 own territories. Sometimes tiie powers of the central 
 authority are so small that the union is hardly entitled to 
 rank as a real example of confederation ; as, for example, 
 when a number of States combine to form a Zollverein, or 
 Customs Union. But usually the Confederate Government 
 is empowered to maintain an army, a fact which almost 
 necessarily implies control of the foreign policy of the differ- 
 ent States, and to legislate on matters of common interest, 
 such as posts and telegraphs, coinage, criminal offences, and 
 so on. Of this type was the North German Confederation 
 of 1866-70 ; and such it seems, though the circumstances are 
 peculiar, is the position of the present German Empire, 
 which, though it has vast legislative and military authority, 
 has very little executive, administrative, or judicial power.* 
 In this last feature lies the real weakness of the confederation 
 as a type of union. The central body, having no officials to 
 enforce its statutes, is obliged to resort to the clumsy ex- 
 pedient of so-called federal execution, in case of disobedi- 
 ence to its laws by one of its members. This expedient 
 involves invasion of the offending State by the confederate 
 army, and, of course, usually results in a break-up of the 
 confederation. In Germany this unfortunate tradition was 
 inherited from that political monstrosity the Holy Roman 
 Empire. 
 
 Right of Secession. — A very important question was 
 raised by the Southern States of the American Union, in the 
 unhappy civil war of the sixties, which has in all probability, 
 done much to discredit this type of government. They 
 maintained, as will be remembered, that the Union was a 
 Confederation, and that, therefore, any of its members who 
 chose might withdraw. The event of the war was against 
 this contention, which was, indeed, untenable in the face of 
 the executive, administrative and judicial organization of the 
 
 ♦Switzerland seems to stand on the border line. The confederate 
 government has little direct administrative or judicial authority; but 
 it has a good deal of supervising and critical authority.
 
 VARIETIES OF POLITICAL SOCIETY 159 
 
 Union. Occasionally, however, the right of secession is 
 expressly reserved by the pact of union.* 
 
 3. Federations. — Far more important is the tme federal 
 type of State, in which the central authority is invested, not 
 merely with legislative and military, but with executive and 
 judicial authority. Some of the most important modem 
 examples of State-making fall under this head. It is the type 
 of the United States of America, of the Dominion of Canada, 
 and, probably in the near future, of the Commonwealth of 
 Australia. Indeed it seems to be the true type also of the 
 anomalous government of the British Empire, which, with a 
 few important but feasible alterations, would approximate 
 closely to a federal constitution. The essential features of a 
 federal constitution have been admirably sketched by Pro- 
 fessor Dicey, in his "Introduction to the Study of the Con- 
 stitution," and may be summarized briefly thus : — 
 
 (a) A written supreme constitution^ in order to prevent 
 disputes between the jurisdictions of the Federal 
 and the States' authorities ; 
 {h) A distribution of powers^ between the central or 
 federal government and the governments of the 
 several States which comprise the union ; and 
 probably also among the various parts of the 
 federal government ; 
 {c) A Supreme Court, charged with the duty of interpret- 
 ing the constitution, and enforcing obedience to 
 it by the organs both of the Federal and States' 
 governments, and absolutely free from the influ- 
 ence of both. 
 It cannot be denied that the federal type of government, 
 in all its forms, has its weak points. Based obviously on 
 compromise, it is less likely than national or centralized 
 government to awaken profound enthusiasm, or to gather 
 
 •This is the case with the so-called "Federal Council of Austra- 
 lasia," adopted as a temporary expedient in 1885. It had very little 
 success.
 
 l6o A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 around it that halo of patriotic sentiment which is one of the 
 greatest safeguards of a State. Complicated as its machinery 
 must inevitably be, and slow in its working, it is apt to get 
 out of order and diflicult to stir to prompt action. It was 
 the first weakness which caused the heroic founders of 
 modern Italy to reject the federal principle, when its adop- 
 tion would, apparently, have solved many of their greatest 
 difficulties. The second weakness has been unmistakably 
 manifest in the history of the United States of America ; and 
 the third is daily obvious in the procedure of Swiss politics. 
 But, in spite of these drawbacks, federalism has shown a 
 mar\'ellous capacity for adapting itself to different circum- 
 stances and different peoples ; and it is probably destined to 
 play a large part in future political history. 
 
 Common Law and prepogative States.— The last 
 classification of political societies which we shall notice is one 
 of extreme importance, but which has only of recent years 
 deserved the attention which it merits. It divides them on 
 the one hand into common law, and, on the other, into pre- 
 rogative States. In the former class, all persons, officials no 
 less than private individuals, are equal before the law, are 
 judged by the same tribunals, and are subject to the same 
 rules. In the latter, not only are there many privileged 
 individuals, but the whole great class of Government officials 
 is exempt (wholly or partially) from the jurisdiction of the 
 ordinary Courts of Justice. To the first class belong, sub- 
 stantially speaking, only the English-speaking communities ;* 
 to the second all the other States of the civilized world. It 
 is, therefore, especially important that English readers should 
 quite understand what the distinction means. 
 
 Common Law States. — It does not mean, of course, 
 that in English-speaking communities a Government official 
 may not do what in a private person would be unlawful. 
 
 *The principle has been tried and abandoned in modem Italy; there 
 is some trace of its existence in Switzerland and Scandinavia.
 
 VARIETIES OF POLITICAL SOCIETY i6i 
 
 Every day we see Government officials imprisoning criminals, 
 seizing goods for debt, searching suspected houses, and doing 
 many other things which no private person may do. But it 
 does mean — 
 
 (i) That no Government official may do these things 
 without legal authority ; 
 
 (ii) That, if his authority is questioned, it must be proved 
 by him in precisely the same way, and before precisely the 
 same tribunals, as in the case of a private person accused of a 
 similar act.* If the act would have been criminal in a private 
 person, the official may be prosecuted in a criminal court ; if 
 it would have been only a civil wrong in a private person, 
 the official can be sued for it in an ordinary civil court. And 
 neither of these tribunals will accept any plea of "act of 
 State," or "superior orders," as an answer to such a com- 
 plaint, at any rate when the complaint is made by a citizen. 
 The net result is that the Government officials in an Eng- 
 lish-speaking country are subject to the ordinary or com- 
 mon law. 
 
 Prerogative States. — In other countries just the oppo- 
 sive rules prevail. On the one hand, Government officials, 
 from the highest to the lowest, act in what they believe to be 
 the interest of the State, whether or no they have legal 
 authority for their actions. On the other, their acts cannot 
 be questioned by the ordinary tribunals, at any rate without 
 the consent of their official superiors. The net result is what 
 the French call droit administratif, a phrase for which there 
 is really no English equivalent, but which means law upon 
 which only a Government official is entitled to act, and which 
 
 * It must be admitted that, even in ^".common law" countries, there 
 are some exceptions to this rule. For example, in England, the King 
 or Queen is personally exempt from suit, though his or her subordi- 
 nates cannot plead orders as an excuse for illegal conduct. Peers are 
 privileged in the matter of tribunal (not of law). Members of Parlia- 
 ment are temporarily privileged in respect of minor offences. But these 
 exceptions are infinitesimal compared with the list in Continental 
 countries.
 
 I62 A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 is, in effect, what the Government chooses to make it. 
 Under cover of this so-called "law," the ordinary citizen is 
 subjected, in foreign countries, to an amount of supervision 
 and arbitrary interference which would produce a revolution 
 in England in a twelvemonth. And this, in spite of the most 
 solemn guarantees of individual freedom in constitutional 
 documents. 
 
 How the difference arose.— A thoughtful Americaa 
 writer, Mr. Lawrence Lowell, has indicated, no doubt with 
 accuracy, the cause for the existence of the distinction. It 
 is just one of those cases in which history furnishes the only 
 clue to the solution of a modern difficulty. In England the 
 judicial side of State activity developed with great complete- 
 ness long before the administrative side. Consequently, 
 when administrative activity began to increase, it found itself 
 confronted with a powerful and highly organized system of 
 judicial tribunals, which jealously kept it in check. There 
 was a severe struggle, which covered the whole of the seven- 
 teenth century in England, and lasted well on into the 
 eighteenth. But, in the long run, the law courts triumphed ; 
 and Englishmen reaped the benefit, not only in their old 
 country, but in those new countries to which they carried the 
 birthright of English comtnon law. On the Continent, on the 
 other hand, the administrative authority of the State devel- 
 oped long before \.\\e judicial ; and men learned to look upon 
 the administrative officials of the State as earthly providences, 
 while the State's law courts were weak, and commanded no 
 particular respect. Quite naturally, when the State's law 
 courts were at length organized upon systematic lines, the 
 administrative officials declined to submit their conduct to the 
 scrutiny of the new tribunals. In fact, they utterly refused to 
 believe in the possibility of stable government on such terms. 
 In the view of every Continental Minister, Government 
 oflficials must, if they wish to maintain order, frequently violate 
 the ordinary law. And to have their authority questioned by 
 ordinary tribunals would, he argpaes, be entirely subversive
 
 VARIETIES OF POLITICAL SOCIETY 163 
 
 of discipline. If it is pointed out to such a man that Anglo- 
 Saxon Governments, all the world over, enjoy a stability 
 which is certainly not less than that of their Continental 
 contemporaries, he shrugs his shoulders, and enters the fact 
 as one more of the peculiarities of the peculiar Anglo-Saxon. 
 One humorous feature of the situation should not, however, 
 be overlooked. When Montesquieu and other French writers 
 of the eighteenth century dilated to their countrymen upon 
 the virtues of the British constitution, one of the chief excel- 
 lences which they praised was the so-called ' ' separation of 
 powers." Now the real "separation of powers" which the 
 British constitution of the eighteenth century actually enjoyed 
 was the freedom of the law courts from the control of the 
 Ministers. But the French, and, after them, the other poli- 
 ticians of the Continent, took it to mean the freedom of the 
 Ministers from the control of the law courts. And, when the 
 governments of the continent were reconstructed after the 
 French Revolution, this was the form in which the British 
 principle appeared. Truly, logic is sometimes a dangerous 
 instrument. 
 
 Here must end our imperfect attempt to evolve order out 
 of the chaos of History. Those readers to whom the political 
 arrangements of the world represent merely the outcome of 
 a series of local accidents will have little sympathy with an 
 effort based on a totally different belief. But to those who, 
 with the writer, regard History as the outward manifestation 
 of great universal laws, capable of infinite variety in the 
 circumstances of their application, but tending with irresistible 
 impetus to similar ends, this attempt may seem to have been 
 made not altogether in vain. Regarded from one standpoint, 
 the Art of Politics may appear to be nothing but the " scuf- 
 fling of kites and crows." Regarded from another, it is an 
 effort, miserable and imperfect perhaps, but still an effort, to 
 realize that deep-seated instinct of humanity which bids Man 
 turn for help and guidance to his fellow Man. It is an afiirma-
 
 I64 A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS 
 
 tion, on unmistakable lines, of that social side of our nature 
 which may fairly be regarded as one of the fundamental facts 
 of the universe. As such, it is surely worth earnest and impar- 
 tial study; and all the dreary and repellent accessories which 
 attend its practice cannot disguise its essential importance. 
 The day may be far distant when the actual political arrange- 
 ments of the world will realize the highest ideal of which our 
 social instincts are capable. But every life honestly spent in 
 the faithful service of the common weal, every hour devoted 
 to the earnest study of the public good brings that day more 
 surely within our reach.
 
 A SHORT LIST OF 
 
 USEFUL AUTHORITIES 
 
 Type I — Savage Society 
 
 Spencer, W. B. and Gillen, F. J. The Native Tribes of 
 
 Central Australia. London, 1899. 
 FisoN, L. and Howitt, A. W. Kamilaroi and Kurnai. 
 
 Melbourne, 1880. 
 Morgan, L. H. Ancient Society. London, 1877. 
 
 Type II — Patriarchal Society 
 
 Seebohm, F. The Tribal System in Wales. London, 1895. 
 Seebohm, F. The English Village Community. London, 
 
 1883. 
 Roe, Sir C. A. Tribal Law in the Panjab. Lahore, n. d. 
 Skene, W. F. Celtic Scotland. (Vol. IIL) Edinburgh, 
 
 1880. 
 Galton, Sir F. Narrative of an Explorer. London, 1853. 
 Coulanges, F. de. La CitS Antique. Paris, 1864. 
 
 There have been English translations or adaptations of this 
 work, e. g.— 
 
 Small, W. The Ancient City. Boston, 1874. 
 
 Barker, T. C. Aryan Civilization. Chipping Nor- 
 ton, 1&71. 
 
 (165)
 
 x66 BRIEF BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 Powell, B. H. Baden. The Indian Village Community. 
 London, 1896. 
 Larger works on the same subject by the same author are — 
 The Land Systems of British India. Oxford, 1892. 
 Short Account of the Land Revenue Systems of 
 British India. Oxford, 1894. 
 Brentano, L. English Gilds. London, 1870. 
 
 Type III — Modern (Political) Society 
 
 Dicey, A. V. The Law of the Constitution. London, 1885. 
 Lowell, A. L. Government and Parties in Continental 
 Europe. London, 1896. 
 
 Local Government and Taxation. London, 1875. 
 
 (A volume of Cobden Club Essays by various writers.) 
 Fyffe, C. a. a History of Modern Europe. London, 
 
 1 891. 
 Bryce, James. The United States of America. London, 
 
 1891. 
 Bluntschli. The Theory of the State. Oxford, 1885. 
 
 Trans.
 
 INDEX 
 
 Administration, 140, 146, 162. 
 
 — aspects of, 146. 
 
 — and justice, i6a. 
 
 — of justice, 112. 
 
 Adoption, 16, 69, 70. 
 
 Agency, 129, 136. 
 
 Agnatic succession, 32. 
 
 Agriculture, 44, 46, 102. 
 
 — and the clan, 44, sqq. 
 
 — early methods of, 46. 
 
 — organization of, 50. 
 
 Alienation of land, 104. 
 
 Allegiance, 2, 77. 
 
 — military, 77. 
 
 Ancestor worship, 38, 39, 68, 78 
 
 Animals, domestication of, 20, 
 
 as- 
 
 Apprenticeship, 69. [g^ 
 
 Australian aborigines, 6, 7, 44, 
 — system of relationship, 11. 
 Aristotle's Classification o f 
 States, 151. 
 
 Barter and sale, 65. 
 
 Birth, as title to property, 102. 
 
 Black Death, the, 143. 
 
 Blood feud, the, 14, 42, 112, 113, 
 
 115, "6. 
 Blood fines, 42, log. 
 
 Capital, conception of, 31. 
 Caste, Indian system of, 69. 
 Cattle lending, 34, 81. 
 Champion, the, 36. 
 Chief, the, 35, 56. 
 — of the clan, 72. 
 — of the tribe, 72. 
 Chiefship, disappearance of, 85. 
 Christianity, effect of, 78. 
 Church and State, 78, 87. 
 Church, effect of the, on land, 
 
 109. 
 Clan, the, 19, 72, etc. 
 Clergy, the, 131. 
 Crime, 113. 
 
 Criminal law in early times, 116. 
 Codification, 122. 
 Coined money, 66. 
 Colleges, religious, 40, 
 Commendation, 81. 
 Commerce, 64. 
 Common Law States, 160. 
 Communication, means of, 141. 
 Competition, 21. 
 Composite States, 156. 
 Confederations, 157. 
 Conquest, 76. 
 Constable, 54. 
 Constitutional Government, 88. 
 
 (167)
 
 i68 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Coiistilutiotis, rigid or flexible, 
 
 153- 
 
 Contract, priiiriple of, in poli- 
 tics, 156. 
 
 Convertible husbandry, 50. 
 
 Council, the, 37, 88, 89-92, 131. 
 
 Courts of Law, 126. 
 
 Crops, alternations of, 47. 
 
 Custom, 41, 54, 70, 79, 89, 126. 
 
 — enforced by State becomes 
 legislation, 134. 
 
 Curfew, the, 142. 
 
 Curia, the, 131. 
 
 Debts, 109. 
 
 de Coulanges, Fustel, 39, 55. 
 
 Domestication of animals, 20, 
 
 23- 
 
 Dooms, 119. 
 
 Droit Adtninistratif, 161. 
 
 Ealdorman, the, 69. 
 Elective Monarchy, 87. 
 Enclosure movement, 51, 109, 
 
 no. 
 Estates, representation of, 131- 
 
 134- 
 Exchange, 64, 100. 
 Exclusiveness o f patriachal 
 
 societies, 70. 
 — of early States, 21. 
 
 Fealty, 81. 
 
 Federal Constitutions, 159. 
 — States, 156, etc. 
 Feudalism, 80, 117, 118. 
 — English form of, 117, 118. 
 — hereditary character of, 118. 
 — the State and, 117. 
 Fictions, 128, 137. 
 Field-grass system, 47. 
 
 Fines, 42, 112. 
 Forest clearings, 46. 
 Forfeiture, 1 14. 
 Fosterage, 16, 59. 
 
 Gild, tho, 62, 68, 69, 72, 81, 144. 
 — character of the, 68. 
 — dissolution of the, 144. 
 Government, i, 89. 
 — activity of, 90. 
 — constitutional, 89. 
 — constitutional and autocratic, 
 152- 
 
 Headman, the, 54. 
 Heir-apparent, the, 36. 
 Hereditarj' kingship, 86. 
 Holdings of land, 52, 54. 
 Household, the, 19, 72. 
 Hue and cry, 114. 
 Hundred-moot, the, 130. 
 
 Industry, 62, 63-66. 
 — specialization of, 64, 
 Inheritance, 104. 
 Institutions, 4, 84. 
 Iron, use of, 62. 
 Itinerant judges, 117, 127. 
 
 Joint liability, 130. 
 Judges, 118. 
 — itinerant, 117, 127. 
 Jurisdiction of the Church, 122. 
 Jury, origin of, 121. 
 — foundation of, 127. 
 Justice, 112, sqq. 
 Justice and administration, 
 conflict of, 162. 
 
 King and council, 88.
 
 INDEX 
 
 169 
 
 King's highway, 141. 
 —peace, 95, 114, 115. 
 — representatives, 91. 
 Kingship, 84-S9. 
 — becomes elective, 86. 
 — becomes hereditary, 86. 
 — religious, 87. 
 Kinship, 2, II, 38, 57, 59. 
 — male, 16, 26. 
 
 Labour, 27, 52, 82, loi, no, 143. 
 
 — State re.i^ulation of, 52, 143. 
 
 Land, 57, 58, 100, 102, 103, 104- 
 107. 
 
 — alienation of, 108. 
 
 — ownership of, 105, 106. 
 
 — private property in, 99, 103. 
 
 Landlordism, 104. 
 
 Landlords and the State, 107. 
 
 Landowners, representation of, 
 
 ISO- 
 Law, 124, sqi]. 
 
 Law courts, 126. 
 
 — savage, 13. 
 
 — tribal, 40, 43. 
 
 — uniformity of, 125. 
 
 Law.s, fundamental and ordi- 
 nary, 153. 
 
 Legal days, 120. 
 
 Legal frictions, 128. 
 
 — forms, 120. 
 
 Leges Barbarorum, 125. 
 
 Legislation, 124, 128, 134. 
 
 jL^^ ialionis, 42. 
 
 Local government, 130, 154. 
 
 Lord and landlord, 106. 
 
 Lordships, 94, 104, no. 
 
 Majorities, doctrine of, 135-139. 
 Market, 66, 68. 
 
 Marriage, 9, 16, 27, 29. 
 
 — by capture, 28. 
 
 — by purchase, 29. 
 
 — rules of, 29. 
 Meadow land, 51. 
 Metals, precious, 66. 
 
 — work in, 62, 75. 
 Migration, 77. 
 Militarism, 79. 
 Military allegiance, 77. 
 
 — service, 2, 82, 92. 
 
 — societies, type of, 2. rj_g 
 Modern political machinery, 
 
 — religion, 39. 
 
 — societies, 70, 73. 
 Money, 66. 
 Moots, 131. 
 
 Nation, not identical with State, 
 
 147. 
 Nobility, degrees of, 35. 
 
 — new, 79, 80. 
 Noblts, the, 131. 
 Nomadism, 57. 
 
 Oath of kindred, the, 34, 121. 
 Offences, private, 116. 
 
 — public, 113. 
 
 — of violence, 112. 
 Offices, 104, etc. 
 
 — hereditary, 105. 
 Officials, 72. 
 
 — Government, rights and lia- 
 bilities of, i6o. 
 
 — of village, 54. 
 Open fields, 50, 109. 
 Ordaining power of crown, 134. 
 Ordeal, the, 121. 
 Organization, vaneties of, 152. 
 Outlawry, 114.
 
 lyo 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Pack, the, 8, 19. 
 Parliament, the, 131-133. 
 
 — original duties of, 133. 
 Pastoral pursuits, 26, 27, 30. 
 Paternal authority, 17. 
 Patria potestas, 17. 
 Patriarchal household, 3. 
 
 — societies, 2, 3, 16, 18, 69, 70. 
 
 and modem societies, 69. 
 
 Patricians, 3. 
 
 Peers, trial by, 117. 
 
 Personal union, 20. 
 
 Petitions, 133. 
 
 Pets, keeping of, 14. 
 
 Plague, the, 143. 
 
 Plebeians, 3. 
 
 Police, 142. 
 
 Politics, I, 2. 
 
 Political representation, 128, 146. 
 
 — society, varieties of, 73, 151. 
 Polygamy, 17. 
 
 Poor laws, 145. 
 Posts, 141. 
 Prerogative, 134. 
 
 — States, 160. 
 Private oflenses, 116. 
 
 — property, no. 
 Production, 64. 
 
 Profit, conception of, 31. 
 
 — of officials, 105. 
 Property, 26, 30, 97-105, 108, m . 
 
 — individual, in. 
 
 — origin of, 26. 
 
 — private. In land, 103. 
 
 — stages in history of, 97, 99, 
 100, 107. 
 
 — State and, 104, in. 
 Proselytism, 39. 
 Public health, 146. 
 
 — property, 98. 
 
 Punishment, 114. 
 
 Purchase as giving title, los. 
 
 Ranks, 34, 35. 
 Record, proof by, 121. 
 Records, 125. 
 
 Relationship, systems of, 11. 
 Religion, 38, 40, 78, 87. 
 
 — modern, 39. 
 
 — tribal, 38. 
 Religious colleges, 40. 
 
 — secrecy, 40. 
 Rent, 52, 56, 68, 105. 
 
 — money, 52. 
 Representation of estates, 130. 
 
 132- 
 
 — political, 128, 146. 
 Representatives, election of, 
 
 136. 
 
 — of King, 91. 
 Revenue, in, 142. 
 Right, a, 97. 
 
 Sacrifice, 13, 38. 
 
 Sale, savage forms of, 67. 
 
 — of village land, 108. 
 Sanctuary, 114. 
 Savage law, 8, 13. 
 Scatt, 92. 
 
 Scottish laws, 59. 
 
 Sea, the, no property in, 99. 
 
 Secession, 158. 
 
 Separation of powers, 163. 
 
 Sept, the, 18. 
 
 Serfdom, dissolution of, 144. 
 
 Serfs, 33, 55. 
 
 Sheriffs, 117. 
 
 Shire, the, 91. 
 
 Shire-moot, 131. 
 
 Slavery, 27, 28.
 
 INDEX 
 
 X7I 
 
 Society, i. 
 
 — modem, political, 73, etc., 
 
 151. 
 Sovereignty, 151, 153. 
 Specialization, 64, 75. 
 Standards of measure and 
 
 value, 143. 
 State administration, 146-150. 
 State and administration, 140, 
 
 etc. 
 
 — " feudalism, 117. 
 
 — " landlords, 104. 
 
 — " legislation, 124. 
 
 — " property,97, 104, III. 
 
 — becomes individual, 80. 
 
 — character of, 77, 140. 
 
 — Church and, 79, 88. 
 
 — interference, 145-148. 
 
 — justice of, 112, 118, 119. 
 
 — origin of modern, in warfare, 
 
 73, 75- 
 
 — socialism, 143. 
 
 — the territorial, 77. 
 
 States, classification of , 151,^5'^. 
 
 — common law and preroga- 
 tive, 160. 
 
 — composite, 156. 
 
 — federal, 156. 
 
 — organization of, 84. 
 Statute of Winchester, 55. 
 Succession, agnatic, 32, 
 
 Taxation, 133. 
 Taxes, 105. 
 Territorial States, 77. 
 
 — union, 20. 
 
 — waters, 100. 
 Theft, 112. 
 Theology, 39. 
 Three-field system, 48. 
 
 Tithings, 14*. 
 Tokens, 65. 
 Totem, the, 12. 
 
 — group, the, 9. 
 Totemistic societies, 3, 9-12. 
 Townsmen, representation of, 
 
 132. 
 Trades Unions, 145. 
 Traditions, 89. 
 Treason, 116. 
 Trial by battle, 114, HI. 
 
 — by jury, 122. 
 Tribal chief, the, 72. 
 
 — land, 37. 
 
 — law, 40, 43. 
 
 — organization, 32, etc., 56. 
 Tribal religion, 38. 
 Tribe, the, 8, 18, 32, 70. 
 Tribes, consolidation of, 76. 
 — differentiation of, 30. 
 
 — membership of, 33. 
 — officials of, 35. 
 — pastoral, 29. 
 Tribunals, 122. 
 Tribute, forms of, 92. 
 Two-field system, 48. 
 
 Unearned increment, 106. 
 Union and unity, 157. 
 Unions, classification of, 157, 
 
 etc. 
 —real, 157. 
 
 User of land, limited, 103. 
 —the germ of property, 100. 
 
 Value, standards of, 65, 143. 
 
 Vassals, 81. 
 
 Village, the, 50, etc. 
 
 — agricultural, the, 103, etc. 
 
 — communities, 51, etc.
 
 172 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Village communities, dissolu- 
 tion of, 107. 
 
 — craftsmen, 66. 
 
 — custom, no. 
 
 — lordship, 60. 
 
 — officials, 54. 
 
 — organization, 56. 
 
 —origin of, 55, 56. 
 
 Villagers, the, become tenants, 
 108. 
 
 Violence, 114. 
 
 War, 75, 80, 92. 
 
 War bands, German, 75, 
 Waste, 51,52. 
 Wealth, 74. 
 — of nations, 145. 
 Weapons, 75, loi. 
 Welsh chief, the, 35. 
 — laws, 58. 
 — societies, 17. 
 Witnesses, 121. 
 Worship, 38, 39, 68, 78. 
 Wrongs, bootless, 113. 
 
 Zollverein, 158.
 
 GLOSSARY 
 
 Agha, 52, 56. 
 Alcheringa, the, 11. 
 Alltud, 33, 58. 
 
 Balks, 51. 
 Ballys, 58. 
 Birraark, the, 11 
 Boaire, the, 30, 34, 57. 
 Bothach, 34. 
 Brehons, 37. 
 
 Caeth, 34. 
 Cantred, 58. 
 Ceile, 56, 60. 
 Ciniud, 57. 
 Corroboree, 10. 
 Cro, 42. 
 Cyning, 35. 
 
 Davoch, 59. 
 Dialwr, 36. 
 
 Etch grain, 50. 
 Engrossing, 71. 
 Eric, 42. 
 
 Feastings, 56, 60. 
 Far Midba, 34. 
 Fin6, 57. 
 
 Flaith, the, 57. 
 Forestalling, 71. 
 Frith-gild, 68. 
 Fuidhir, 33, 57. 
 
 Galanas, 42. 
 Gesith, 75. 
 Gwely, 58. 
 
 Heretoch, 36, 76. 
 Henadwr, 37. 
 Husbandland, 59. 
 
 Jirgah, 37. 
 
 Khan, 35. 
 Khiraj, 60. 
 
 Mab, the, 17. 
 Maiden fee, 60, 
 Moot, 54. 
 Mormaer, 35. 
 
 Nardoo, 44. 
 Nem^, 30. 
 
 Panchayat, 37. 
 Parker, 54. 
 Pen, 35, 
 
 (173)
 
 174 
 
 GLOSSARY 
 
 Pound, 54. 
 Princeps, 75. 
 
 Rachimburg, 37. 
 Reeve, 54. 
 Ri- 35. 
 
 Seisrigh, 58. 
 Sencleithe, the, 34. 
 Steelbow lands, <9. 
 Synnachies, 38. 
 
 Taboo, 13. 
 Taeog, 34. 
 Tanist, 36. 
 Teisbanteuleu, 36. 
 Tenandrie, 59. 
 
 Thane, 76. 
 Thaneston, 59. 
 Tilth grain, 50. 
 Tir Gwelyawg, 59 
 Toisech, 36. 
 Tricha Ceds, 58. 
 Tumand^r, 85. 
 
 Uchelwr, 58. 
 
 Veliki Kniaz, 36. 
 Vesh, 53, 
 
 Wer, 4a. 
 
 Yardling, 52, 56. 
 
 Zamindar. 53.
 
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