oubtless
admitted to these sacrifices; and when that was once done we can
believe that it seemed equally easy, or not more difficult, to
conceive them as sharing in the common lineage. The conclusion then
which is suggested by the evidence is, not that all early societies
were formed by descent from the same ancestor, but that all of them
which had any permanence and solidity either were so descended or
assumed that they were. An indefinite number of causes may have
shattered the primitive groups, but wherever their ingredients
recombined, it was on the model or principle of an association of
kindred. Whatever were the fact, all thought, language, and law
adjusted themselves to the assumption. But though all this seems to me
to be established with reference to the communities with whose records
we are acquainted, the remainder of their history sustains the
position before laid down as to the essentially transient and
terminable influence of the most powerful Legal Fictions. At some
point of time--probably as soon as they felt themselves strong enough
to resist extrinsic pressure--all these states ceased to recruit
themselves by factitious extensions of consanguinity. They
necessarily, therefore, became Aristocracies, in all cases where a
fresh population from any cause collected around them which could put
in no claim to community of origin. Their sternness in maintaining the
central principle of a system under which political rights were
attainable on no terms whatever except connection in blood, real or
artificial, taught their inferiors another principle, which proved to
be endowed with a far higher measure of vitality. This was the
principle of _local contiguity_, now recognised everywhere as the
condition of community in political functions. A new set of political
ideas came at once into existence, which, being those of ourselves,
our contemporaries, and in great measure of our ancestors, rather
obscure our perception of the older theory which they vanquished and
dethroned.

The Family then is the type of an archaic society in all the
modifications which it was capable of assuming; but the family here
spoken of is not exactly the family as understood by a modern. In
order to reach the ancient conception we must give to our modern ideas
an important extension and an important limitation. We must look on
the family as constantly enlarged by the absorption of strangers
within its circle, and we must try to regard th