POLITICAL INTEGRATION. 275 



village-community. Though, in presence of the 



evidence furnished by races having irregular sexual relations, 

 we cannot allege that sameness of blood is the primary 

 reason for political cooperation though in numerous tribes 

 which have not risen into the pastoral state, there is com 

 bination for offence and defence among those whose different 

 totems are recognized marks of different bloods ; yet where 

 there has been established descent through males, and 

 especially where monogamy prevails, sameness of blood 

 becomes largely, if not mainly, influential in determining 

 political cooperation. And this truth, under one of its 

 aspects, is the truth above enunciated, that combined action, 

 requiring a tolerable homogeneity of nature among those who 

 carry it on, is, in early stages, most successful among those 

 who, being descendants of the same ancestors, have the 

 greatest likeness. 



An all-important though less direct effect of blood-relation 

 ship, and especially that more definite blood-relationship 

 which arises from monogamic marriage, has to be added. I 

 mean community of religion a likeness of ideas and senti 

 ments embodied in the worship of a common deity. Begin 

 ning, as this does, with propitiation of the deceased 

 founder of the family ; and shared in, as it is, by the multi 

 plying groups of descendants, as the family spreads ; it 

 becomes a further means of holding together the compound 

 cluster gradually formed, and checking the antagonisms that 

 arise between the component clusters : so favouring integra 

 tion. The influence of the bond supplied by a common cult 

 everywhere meets us in ancient history. Each of the cities 

 in primitive Egypt was a centre for the worship of a special 

 divinity ; and no one who, unbiassed by foregone conclusions, 

 observes the extraordinary development of ancestor-worship, 

 under all its forms, in Egypt, can doubt the origin of this 

 divinity. Of the Greeks we read that 



&quot; Each family had its own sacred rites and funereal commemoration 

 of ancestors, celebrated by the master of the house, to which none but 

 members of the family were admissible : the extinction of a family, 



