4:62 POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS. 



defend and avenge its members, and a joint responsibility for 

 tlieir actions. 



And now we are prepared for observing sundry influences 

 which conspire to change the grouping of kindred into poli 

 tical grouping, locally as well as generally. In the first place, 

 there is that admission of strangers into the family, gens, or 

 tribe, which we have before recognized as a normal process, 

 from savage life upwards. Livingstone, remarking of the 

 Bakwains that &quot;the government is patriarchal,&quot; describes 

 each chief man as having his hut encircled by the huts of his 

 wives, relatives, and dependents, forming a kotla : &quot; a poor 

 man attaches himself to the kotla of a rich one and is con 

 sidered a child of the latter.&quot; Here we see being done 

 informally, that which was formally done in the Eoman 

 household and the Teutonic mark. In proportion as the 

 adopted strangers increase, and in proportion also as the 

 cluster becomes diluted by incorporating with itself emanci 

 pated dependents, the links among its members become 

 weakened and its character altered. In the second place, 

 when, by concentration and multiplication, different clusters 

 of kindred placed side by side, become interspersed, and there 

 ceases to be a direct connexion between locality and kinship, 

 the family or gentile bonds are further weakened. And then 

 there eventually results, both for military and fiscal pur 

 poses, the need for a grouping based on locality instead of on 

 relationship. An early illustration is furnished by the 

 Kleisthenian revolution in Attica, which made a division of 

 the territory into denies, replacing for public purposes tribal 

 divisions by topographical divisions, the inhabitants of each 

 of which had local administrative powers and public respoii 

 sibilities. 



We are here brought to the vexed question about the origin 

 of tythings and hundreds. It was pointed out that the 

 ancient Peruvians had civil as well as military divisions 

 into tens and hundreds, with their respective officers. In 

 China, where there is pushed to an extreme the principle of 



