ly attracted
notice, everywhere we discover traces of passages in their history
when men of alien descent were admitted to, and amalgamated with, the
original brotherhood. Adverting to Rome singly, we perceive that the
primary group, the Family, was being constantly adulterated by the
practice of adoption, while stories seem to have been always current
respecting the exotic extraction of one of the original Tribes and
concerning a large addition to the houses made by one of the early
kings. The composition of the state, uniformly assumed to be natural,
was nevertheless known to be in great measure artificial. This
conflict between belief or theory and notorious fact is at first sight
extremely perplexing; but what it really illustrates is the efficiency
with which Legal Fictions do their work in the infancy of society. The
earliest and most extensively employed of legal fictions was that
which permitted family relations to be created artificially, and there
is none to which I conceive mankind to be more deeply indebted. If it
had never existed, I do not see how any one of the primitive groups,
whatever were their nature, could have absorbed another, or on what
terms any two of them could have combined, except those of absolute
superiority on one side and absolute subjection on the other. No
doubt, when with our modern ideas we contemplate the union of
independent communities, we can suggest a hundred modes of carrying it
out, the simplest of all being that the individuals comprised in the
coalescing groups shall vote or act together according to local
propinquity; but the idea that a number of persons should exercise
political rights in common simply because they happened to live within
the same topographical limits was utterly strange and monstrous to
primitive antiquity. The expedient which in those times commanded
favour was that the incoming population should _feign themselves_ to
be descended from the same stock as the people on whom they were
engrafted; and it is precisely the good faith of this fiction, and the
closeness with which it seemed to imitate reality, that we cannot now
hope to understand. One circumstance, however, which it is important
to recollect, is that the men who formed the various political groups
were certainly in the habit of meeting together periodically, for the
purpose of acknowledging and consecrating their association by common
sacrifices. Strangers amalgamated with the brotherhood were d