170 SOCIAL HEREDITY AND SOCIAL EVOLUTION 



acter of the people was great. The patriarchal 

 system produced sluggishness of the people and 

 stagnation of the race. Communism made the people 

 restless and produced a race overflowing with activ- 

 ity. The possibility that each might become a leader 

 made men ambitious, and universal ambition pre- 

 vented growth by accretion. 



Centralization Among the Aryans — But in spite of this 

 disintegrating tendency, the forces leading toward 

 centralization were too strong to be checked even 

 by the communism of the Aryans, and even in this 

 race nations grew out of tribes. The formation of 

 modern as well as ancient nations has been due to the 

 irresistible force of concentration and increasing 

 organization, for they are both founded upon the 

 principle that power comes from union. But in the 

 Aryan nation this centralization was a more volun- 

 tary one. These communities purposely com- 

 bined for their own common good. The first associa- 

 tion of this sort of which we have any record, and 

 perhaps the first in existence, was that which the 

 Greeks called the Amphictyon. It was a meeting of 

 numerous Grecian tribes, collected together for the 

 purpose of regulating common warfare, either of 

 offense or defense, and regulating the matter of 

 ancestor-worship, which was the basis of their reli- 

 gion. In this union each tribe counted as one, no 

 matter whether large or small, and the actions which 

 the tribes took were merely for the common good of 

 the tribes as a body. It was a union which did not 

 prevent the different tribes from being thoroughly 

 independent of each other in practically all of their 

 actions. The Amphictyon, however, was the begin- 

 ning of the voluntary union of isolated independent 



