ON THE EVOLUTION OF THE FAMILY. 137 



Semites, it cannot be sustained. Proof has been given that political 

 cooperation and the accompanying structures arise from the confliots 

 of social groups with one another. We have seen that this evolves 

 chieftainship, which becomes established when the military activity is 

 constant ; and we have seen that, having first politically oro-anized 

 simple groups, this process afterward politically organizes compound 

 groups, and again doubly-compound groups. Though it may be facili- 

 tated where " the commonwealth is a collection of persons united by 

 a common descent from the progenitor of an original family," yet, 

 in multitudinous cases, it takes place where no connection of this kind 

 exists among the persons. The members of an Australian tribe which, 

 under a temporary chief, join in battle against those of another tribe 

 have not a common descent, but are alien in blood. If it be said that 

 political functions can in this case scarcely be alleged, then take the 

 case of the Creeks of North America, whose men have various totems 

 implying various ancestries, and whose twenty thousand people, liv- 

 ing in seventy villages, have nevertheless evolved for themselves a 

 government of considerable complexity. Or, still better, take the 

 Iroquois, who, similar in their formation of tribes out of intermingled 

 clans of different stocks, were wielded by combined action in war into 

 a league of five (afterward six) nations under a permanent republican 

 government. Indeed, this system of kinship puts relations in politi- 

 cal antagonism ; so that, as we read in Bancroft of the Kutchins, 

 "there can never be intertribal war without rancjincy fathers and sons 

 against each other." Even apart from the results of mixed clanships, 

 that instability, which we have seen characterized primitive relations 

 of the sexes, negatives the belief that political cooperation every- 

 where originates from family cooperation. Instance the above-named 

 Creeks, of whom, according to Schoolcraft, " a large portion of the old 

 and middle-aged men, by frequently changing, have had many differ- 

 ent wives, and their children, scattered around the country, are un- 

 known to them." 



Thus finding reason to suspect that Sir Henry Maine's theory of 

 the family is not applicable to all human societies, let us proceed to 

 consider it more closely ; 



Pie implies that, in the earliest stages, there were definite marital 

 relations. That which he calls "the infancy of society " "the situa- 

 tion in which mankind disclose themselves at the dawn of their his- 

 tory " is a situation in which " ' every one exercises jurisdiction over 

 his wives and his children, and they pay no regard to one another.' " 

 But in foregoing chapters on "The Primitive Relations of the Sexes," 

 on " Promiscuity," and on " Polyandry," numerous facts have been 

 given, showing that definite, coherent marital relations are preceded 

 by indefinite, incoherent ones ; and also that, among the marital rela- 

 tions evolving out of these, there are in many places types of family 



