MORGAN. | THE CONFEDERACY OF TRIBES. 23 
A state must rest upon territory and not upon, persons; upon the township 
as the unit of a political system, and not upon the gens, which is the unit 
of a social system. It required time and a vast experience, beyond that of 
the American Indian tribes, as a preparation for such a fundamental change 
of systems. It also required men of the mental stature of the Greeks and 
Romans, and with the experience derived from a long chain of ancestors, to 
devise and gradually introduce that new plan of government under which 
civilized nations are living at the present time. 
THE CONFEDERACY OF TRIBES. 
A tendency to confederate for mutual defense would very naturally 
exist among kindred and contiguous tribes. When the advantages of a 
union had been appreciated by actual experience, the organization, at first 
a league, would gradually cement into a federal unity. The state of per- 
petual warfare in which they lived would quicken this natural tendency 
into action among such tribes as were sufficiently advanced in intelligence 
and in the arts of life to perceive its benefits. It would be simply a growth 
from a lower into a higher organization by an extension of the principle 
which united the gentes in a tribe. 
As might have been expected, several confederacies existed in different 
parts of North America when discovered, some of which were quite remarka- 
ble in plan and structure. Among the number may be mentioned the Iro- 
quois Confederacy of five independent tribes, the Creek Confederacy of six, 
the Ottawa Confederacy of three, the Dakota League of the ‘Seven Council 
Fires,” the Moki Confederacy in New Mexico of Seven Pueblos, and the 
Aztec Confederacy of three tribes in the Valley of Mexico. It is probable 
that the Village Indians in other parts of Mexico, in Central and in South 
America, were quite generally organized in confederacies consisting of two 
or more kindred tribes. Progress necessarily took this direction from the 
nature of their institutions and from the law governing their development. 
Nevertheless the formation of a confederacy out of such materials, and with 
such unstable geographical relations, was a difficult undertaking, It was 
