362 HENRY JAMES SUMNER MAINE. 



the horde, — "a company of men and women in which the relations of 

 the sexes were wholly unregulated at first, but passed through various 

 stages of limitation or restriction until the family, patriarchal or other, 

 was reached.'' Maine did not, I think, maintain that the patriarchal 

 idea was the only idea governing the organization of primitive society, 

 but he maintained that it was one of the governing ideas, and one of the 

 most important. It was not an idea reached, but an idea started with. 

 His arguments upon this theme are to be found in his Early Law and 

 Custom. Another theory whicli has met with adverse criticism is the 

 theory that the Russian mi?; with its periodic redistributions of land 

 in equal lots, gives us an idea of the primitive village community. 

 Maine's theory is that private property in land has arisen in consequence 

 of the "disentanglement of individual from collective rights"; that the 

 earliest form of landed property is found in a kind of communistic part- 

 nership. The theory which is opposed to this one is, that the idea of 

 personal and private ownership is at least as ancient as the idea of 

 collective ownership. It is suggested that a communistic partnership 

 among kinsmen means simply that an inheritance, once the holding of 

 an individual, is not yet divided. As for the Russian mir, it leads us 

 neither to one theory nor to the other. Since Maine first wrote about 

 it, it has been shown to be in its present form a comparatively modern 

 institution. The redistributions of the land into equal lots appear to be 

 the result of a system of equal (per capita) taxation. The practice 

 cannot be traced back more than two or three hundred years. The 

 village community of India, in which the land is a partly divided, partly 

 undivided inheritance, may be regarded as the earlier type of village. 

 Another of Maine's theories which may be objected to is the theory 

 that " the typical manor arose out of the village community." It has 

 been maintained, against this view, that the two institutions, the manor 

 and the village community, arose side by side, and then one or the other 

 became dominant. It is as easy for the manor to become a village 

 community as for the village community to become a manor. When 

 the manorial estate is divisible among the heirs, it tends to become a 

 village community. When the chieftainship over a village community 

 becomes hereditary, but is indivisible, the village community tends to 

 become a manor. 



In view of all these theories and counter theories, and of the fact 

 that a great deal can be said in support of every one of them, on both 

 sides, we cannot but feel that the object of historical researches is not 

 so much to find out the order in which ideas have occurred to mankind, 

 and the chronological sequence of human institutions, as it is to find 



