296 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



largely if not chiefly ascribable to it. Our own Indian Empire, too, 

 held together by force in a state of artificial equilibrium, threatens 

 some day to illustrate, by its fall, the incohesion arising from lack of 

 congruity in its components. 



One of the laws of evolution at large is, that integration results 

 when like units are subject to the same force or to like forces (" First 

 Principles," 169); and, from the first stages of political integration 

 up to the last, we find this law illustrated. Joint exposure to uni- 

 form external actions and joint reactions against them have from 

 the beginning been the leading causes of union among members of 

 societies. 



Already there has been indirectly implied the truth that cohe- 

 rence is first given to small hordes of primitive men during com- 

 bined opposition to enemies. Subject to the same danger, and uniting 

 to meet this danger, they become, in the course of their cooperation 

 against it, more bound together. In the first stages, this relation of 

 cause and effect is clearly seen in the fact that such union as arises 

 during a war disappears when the war is over : there is dispersion and 

 loss of all such slight political subordination as was beginning to show 

 itself. But it is by the integration of simple groups into compound 

 groups, in the course of common resistance to foes and attacks upon 

 them, that this process is best exemplified. The cases before given 

 may be reenforced by others. Of the Karens, Mason says : " Each 

 village, being an independent community, had always an old feud to 

 settle with nearly every other village among their own people. But 

 the common danger from more powerful enemies, or having common 

 injuries to requite, often led to several villages uniting together for 

 defense or attack." According to Kolben, " smaller nations of Hot- 

 tentots, which may be near some powerful nation, frequently enter 

 into an alliance, offensive and defensive, against the stronger nation." 

 Among the New Caledonians, in Tanna, " six, or eight, or more of 

 their villages unite, and form what may be called a district, or county, 

 and all league together for mutual protection. ... In war, two or 

 more of these districts unite." In Samoa, " villages, in numbers of 

 eight or ten, unite by common consent, and form a district or state for 

 mutual protection " ; and, in time of war, these districts themselves 

 sometimes unite in twos and threes. The like has happened with 

 historic peoples. It was during the wars of the Israelites, in David's 

 time, that they passed from the state of separate tribes into the state 

 of a consolidated ruling nation. The scattered Greek communities, 

 previously aggregated into minor confederacies by minor wars, were 

 prompted to the Panhellenic congress and to the subsequent coopera- 

 tion, when the invasion of Xerxes was impending ; and, of the Spartan 

 and Athenian confederacies afterward formed, that of Athens acquired 

 the hegemony, and finally the empire, during continued operations 



