POLITICAL DIFFERENTIATION. 299 



potent cause is found in a fact named by Sir Henry Maine. 

 &quot; The founders of a part of our modern European aristocracy, 

 the Danish, are known to have been originally peasants who 

 fortified their houses during deadly village struggles and then 

 used their advantage.&quot; Such superiorities of position, 



once initiated, are increased in another way. Already in the 

 last chapter we have seen that communities are to a certain 

 extent increased by the addition of fugitives from other com 

 munities sometimes criminals, sometimes those who are 

 oppressed. While, in places where such fugitives belong to 

 races of superior types, they often become rulers (as among 

 many Indian hill-tribes, whose rajahs are of Hindoo extrac 

 tion), in places where they are of the same race and cannot 

 do this, they attach themselves to those of chief power in 

 their adopted tribe. Sometimes they yield up their freedom 

 for the sake of protection : a man makes himself a slave by 

 breaking a spear in the presence of his wished-for master, as 

 among the East Africans, or by inflicting some small bodily 

 injury upon him, as among the Fulahs. In ancient Eome 

 the semi-slave class distinguished as clients, originated by this 

 voluntary acceptance of servitude with safety. But where 

 his aid promises to be of value in war, the fugitive offers 

 himself as a warrior in exchange for maintenance and refuge. 

 Other things equal, he chooses for master some one marked 

 by superiority of power and property ; and thus enables the 

 man already dominant to become more dominant. Such 

 armed dependents, having as aliens no claims to the lands of 

 the group, and bound to its head only by fealty, answer in 

 position to the comites as found in the early German commu 

 nities, and as exemplified in old English times by the 

 * Huscarlas&quot; (Housecarls), with whom nobles surrounded 

 themselves. Evidently, too, followers of this kind, having 

 certain interests in common with their protector and no inte 

 rests in common with the rest of the community, become, in 

 his hands, the means of usurping communal rights and ele 

 vating himself while depressing the rest. 



