PATTERNS FOR LIVING TOGETHER 113 



purely physiological matters as individual fecundity and life 

 duration are adversely affected in quantitatively predictable 

 proportion to the intensity of the collision effect. Wherever there 

 is even the beginning of social organization, as in the mamma- 

 lian family group, the group, as well as its component individu- 

 als, has an interest and concern in the nuisances that particular 

 individuals may make of themselves. So there begin to arise 

 restrictions or taboos that set limits to the permissible behavior of 

 the individuals. These restrictions in the group interest do not 

 have to be written down and codified to be real. They exist in 

 entirely effective form in mammals far below man. Many ex- 

 amples could be given if there were time. But a simple one will 

 suffice. Watch a cat playing with a litter of kittens. When a 

 kitten gets too rough or bites too hard mama promptly punishes 

 him. The rule that kittens must not bite a member of the group 

 too hard is quickly learned. 



Human laws began in the evolutionary sense as rules of indi- 

 vidual conduct or behavior, to protect the group from the 

 nuisances and torts that might be perpetrated by individuals. 

 Government followed as a group invention having for its pur- 

 pose to see that the rules were observed. Since no one ever has 

 been able to think up any practical mechanism to ensure the 

 observance of the rules except to punish their infraction, punish- 

 ment became a group function relegated to government. The 

 social group in which law and government began was the primi- 

 tive family. The history of Roman law, that corpus juris upon 

 which the existing jurisprudence of all civilized peoples is based 

 and modeled, in a foreshortened and epitomized way throws 

 light on the essentials of the evolutionary history of all law and 

 government. The stages are clearly evident in the following 

 passage quoted from Greenridge's Historical Introduction to 

 the fourth edition of Edward Poste's classic Gai Institutiones or 

 Institutes of Roman Law by Galus (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 

 1904): "The fact that the primitive Roman State was in many 

 ways conditioned by its clan organization seems to be certain. 

 As the State grew stronger, it substituted the Family for the 



