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CHAPTER XI 
SOCIAL LIFE 
Among primitive, as among civilized, peoples, the form in which 
society is oi'ganized profoundly affects every man, woman, and child 
in the community at every period of their lives. Yet the ordinary 
individual gives little attention to it, but accepts the society in which 
the accident of birth has placed him and directs his thoughts to 
more visiijle matters, to the daily task and the daily food supply, 
the joys and trials of human companionship, and the little events in 
the everyday life that seem to count most for human happiness and 
unhappiness. Alan may be a social being, as Aristotle says, but 
when he reaches maturity he is also intensely conservative, and the 
institutions and forms of government that have moulded his life 
from childhood to manhood seldom excite his unqualified condemna- 
tion in after years. He has learned to adjust himself to them, like 
the fledgling sparrow that beats its way against the winds, aiul hence- 
forward his desire is not to remodel them, not to create new social 
forms that will require his still further adjustment, but to enjoy all 
tlie good things tliat life in the now familiar society can offer him 
before old age and death come knocking at his floor. The span from 
the cradle to the grave seems long to the youth, but at thirty years 
the end of the web is already coming within view. 
Infancy the world over has the same needs and the same limita- 
tions. They make the babe completely dependent on its mother 
during the first few months of its entry into life. The Indian jnother 
had no trained medical advisers to aid her in its upbringing, no 
stores whei'e she could purchase warm clothing to protect it from 
the cold, no wheeled carriage in which she could convey it from one 
place to another. She suckled it for two years and even longer until 
it could masticate the meat and fish that predominated in tlie native 
dietA clothed it, when clothes were necessary, in the furs that its 
father brought home from his hunting; and when the Indians moved 
camp, carried it on her back in a neat home-made cradle of skin, 
1 Troqiioian moflicrs rould sliortei’i tlic period a little through the-ir possession of maize, squash, 
and beans. 
