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KINSHIP AS THE BASIS OF SOCIETY.

LECT. III.

LECTURE III.

KINSHIP AS THE BASIS OF SOCIETY.

THE most recent researches into the primitive history of society point to the conclusion that the earliest tie which knitted men together in communities was Consanguinity or Kinship. The subject has been approached of late years from several different sides, and there has been much dispute as to what the primitive blood-relationship implied, and how it arose; but there has been general agreement as to the fact I have stated. The caution is perhaps needed that we must not form too loose a conception of the kinship which once stood in the place of the multiform influences which are now the cement of human societies. It was regarded as an actual bond of union, and in no respect as a sentimental one. The notion of what, for want of a better phrase, I must call a moral brotherhood in the whole human race has been steadily gaining ground during the whole course of history, and we have now a large abstract term

LECT. III.

PRIMITIVE VIEW OF KINSHIP.

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answering to this notion-Humanity. The most powerful of the agencies which have brought about this broader and laxer view of kinship has undoubtedly been Religion, and indeed one great Eastern religion extended it until for some purposes it embraced all sentient nature. All this modern enlargement of the primitive conception of kinship must be got rid of before we can bring it home to ourselves. There was no brotherhood recognised by our savage forefathers except actual consanguinity regarded as a fact. If a man was not of kin to another there was nothing between them. He was an enemy to be slain, or spoiled, or hated, as much as the wild beasts upon which the tribe made war, as belonging indeed to the craftiest and the cruellest order of wild animals. It would scarcely be too strong an assertion that the dogs which followed the camp had more in common with it than the tribesmen of an alien and unrelated tribe.

The tribes of men with which the student of jurisprudence is concerned are exclusively those belonging to the races now universally classed, on the ground of linguistic affinities, as Aryan and Semitic. Besides these he has at most to take into account that portion of the outlying mass of mankind which has lately been called Uralian, the Turks, Hungarians, and Finns. The characteristic of all these races, when in the tribal state, is that the tribes themselves,

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ARYAN, SEMITIC, AND URALIAN TRIBES. LECT. Iп.

and all subdivisions of them, are conceived by the men who compose them as descended from a single male ancestor. Such communities see the Family group with which they are familiar to be made up of the descendants of a single living man, and of his wife or wives; and perhaps they are accustomed to that larger group, formed of the descendants of a single recently deceased ancestor, which still survives in India as a compact assemblage of blood-relatives, though it is only known to us through the traces it has left in our Tables of Inheritance. The mode of constituting groups of kinsmen which they see proceeding before their eyes they believe to be identical with the process by which the community itself was formed. Thus the theoretical assumption is that all the tribesmen are descended from some common ancestor, whose descendants have formed sub-groups, which again have branched off into others, till the smallest group of all, the existing Family, is reached. I believe I may say that there is substantial agreement as to the correctness of these statements so long as they are confined to the Aryan, Semitic, and Uralian races. At most it is asserted that, among the recorded usages of portions of these races, there are obscure indications of another and an earlier state of things. But then a very different set of assertions from these are made concerning that large part of the human race which cannot be classed as Aryan, Semitic, or Uralian. It is, first of all, alleged that

LECT. III. ABNORMAL CONCEPTIONS OF KINSHIP.

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there is evidence of the wide prevalence among them of ideas on the subject of Consanguinity which are irreconcileable with the assumption of common descent from a single ancestor. Next, it is pointed out that some small, isolated, and very barbarous communities-perhaps long hidden in inaccessible Indian valleys, or within the ring of a coral reef in the Southern Seas-still follow practices which it would be incorrect and unjust to call immoral, because, in the view we are considering, they are older than morality. The suggestion is finally made that if these practices were, in an older stage of the world's history, very much more widely extended than at present, the abnormal, non-Aryan, non-Semitic, nonUralian notions about kinship of which I have spoken would find their explanation. If, indeed, the conclusion here pointed at expresses the truth, and if these practices were really at one time universal, it would be an undeserved compliment to the human race to say that it once followed the ways of the lower animals, since, in point of fact, all the lower animals do not follow the practices thus attributed to them. But, whatever be the interest of such enquiries, they do not concern us till the Kinship of the higher races can be distinctly shown to have grown out of the Kinship now known only to the lower, and even then they concern us only remotely. No doubt several recent writers do believe

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KINSHIP AND POWER.

LECT. III.

in the descent of one form of consanguinity from the other. Mr. Lewis Morgan, of New York, the author of a remarkable and very magnificent volume on 'Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity in the Human Family,' published by the Smithsonian Institute at Washington, reckons no less than ten stages (p. 486) through which communities founded on kinship have passed before that form of the family was developed out of which the Aryan tribes conceive themselves to have sprung. But Mr. Morgan also says of the system known upon the evidence actually to prevail among the Aryan, Semitic, and Uralian divisions of mankind that (p. 469) it' manifestly proceeds upon the assumption of the existence of marriage between single pairs, and of the certainty of parentage through the marriage relation.' 'Hence,' he adds, 'it must have come into existence after the establishment of marriage between single pairs.'

A remark of considerable importance to the student of early usage has now to be made respecting the bond of union recognised by these greater races. Kinship, as the tie binding communities together, tends to be regarded as the same thing with subjection to a common authority. The notions of Power and Consanguinity blend, but they in nowise supersede one another. We have a familiar example of this mixture of ideas in the subjection of the smallest group, the Family, to its patriarchal head. Wherever

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