rted to, and could suppose that
communities began to exist wherever a family held together instead of
separating at the death of its patriarchal chieftain. In most of the
Greek states and in Rome there long remained the vestiges of an
ascending series of groups out of which the State was at first
constituted. The Family, House, and Tribe of the Romans may be taken
as the type of them, and they are so described to us that we can
scarcely help conceiving them as a system of concentric circles which
have gradually expanded from the same point. The elementary group is
the Family, connected by common subjection to the highest male
ascendant. The aggregation of Families forms the Gens or House. The
aggregation of Houses makes the Tribe. The aggregation of Tribes
constitutes the Commonwealth. Are we at liberty to follow these
indications, and to lay down that the commonwealth is a collection of
persons united by common descent from the progenitor of an original
family? Of this we may at least be certain, that all ancient societies
regarded themselves as having proceeded from one original stock, and
even laboured under an incapacity for comprehending any reason except
this for their holding together in political union. The history of
political ideas begins, in fact, with the assumption that kinship in
blood is the sole possible ground of community in political functions;
nor is there any of those subversions of feeling, which we term
emphatically revolutions, so startling and so complete as the change
which is accomplished when some other principle--such as that, for
instance, of _local contiguity_--establishes itself for the first time
as the basis of common political action. It may be affirmed then of
early commonwealths that their citizens considered all the groups in
which they claimed membership to be founded on common lineage. What
was obviously true of the Family was believed to be true first of the
House, next of the Tribe, lastly of the State. And yet we find that
along with this belief, or, if we may use the word, this theory, each
community preserved records or traditions which distinctly showed that
the fundamental assumption was false. Whether we look to the Greek
states, or to Rome, or to the Teutonic aristocracies in Ditmarsh which
furnished Niebuhr with so many valuable illustrations, or to the
Celtic clan associations, or to that strange social organisation of
the Sclavonic Russians and Poles which has only late