308 POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS. 



ever changing their relations to one another and to t&quot;ha 

 environment, we see that wherever there is some coherence 

 and some permanence of relation among the parts, there 

 begin to arise political divisions. Relative superiority of 

 power, first causing a differentiation at once domestic and 

 social, between the activities of the sexes and the consequent 

 positions of the sexes, piesently begins to cause a differentia 

 tion among males, shown in the bondage of captives : a 

 master-class and a slave-class are formed. 



Where men continue the wandering life in pursuit of wild 

 food for themselves or their cattle, the groups they form are 

 debarred from doing more by war than appropriate one 

 another s units individually ; but where men have passed 

 into the agricultural or settled state, it becomes possible for 

 one community to take possession bodily of another com 

 munity, along with the territory it occupies. &quot;When this 

 happens there arise additional class-divisions. The conquered 

 and tribute-paying community, besides having its headmen 

 reduced to subjection, has its people reduced to a state such 

 that, while they continue to live on their lands, they yield 

 up, through the intermediation of their chiefs, part of the 

 produce to the conquerors : so foreshadowing what eventually 

 becomes a serf-class. 



From the beginning the militant class, being by force of 

 arms the dominant class, becomes the class which owns the 

 source of food the land. During the hunting and pastoral 

 stages, the warriors of the group hold the land collectively. 

 On passing into the settled state, their tenures become 

 partly collective and partly individual in sundry ways, and 

 eventually almost wholly individual. But throughout long 

 stages of social evolution, landowning and militancy con 

 tinue to be associated. 



The class-differentiation of which militancy is the active 

 cause, is furthered by the establishment of definite descent, 

 arid especially male descent, and by the transmission of posi 

 tion and property to the eldest son of the eldest continually. 



