refore to the eldest son, and where the
affairs of the Village Community, the corporate unit of Hindoo
society, are confided to a single manager, it is generally the eldest
son who takes up the administration at his parent's death. All
offices, indeed, in India, tend to become hereditary, and, when their
nature permits it, to vest in the eldest member of the oldest stock.
Comparing these Indian successions with some of the ruder social
organisations which have survived in Europe almost to our own day, the
conclusion suggests itself that, when Patriarchal power is not only
_domestic_ but _political_, it is not distributed among all the
issue at the parent's death, but is the birthright of the eldest
son. The chieftainship of a Highland clan, for example, followed
the order of Primogeniture. There seems, in truth, to be a form of
family-dependency still more archaic than any of those which we know
from the primitive records of organised civil societies. The Agnatic
Union of the kindred in ancient Roman law, and a multitude of similar
indications, point to a period at which all the ramifying branches of
the family tree held together in one organic whole; and it is no
presumptuous conjecture, that, when the corporation thus formed by the
kindred was in itself an independent society, it was governed by the
eldest male of the oldest line. It is true that we have no actual
knowledge of any such society. Even in the most elementary
communities, family-organisations, as we know them, are at most
_imperia in imperio_. But the position of some of them, of the Celtic
clans in particular, was sufficiently near independence within
historical times to force on us the conviction that they were once
separate _imperia_, and that Primogeniture regulated the succession to
the chieftainship. It is, however, necessary to be on our guard
against modern associations with the term of law. We are speaking of a
family-connection still closer and more stringent than any with which
we are made acquainted by Hindoo society or ancient Roman law. If the
Roman Paterfamilias was visibly steward of the family possessions, if
the Hindoo father is only joint-sharer with his sons, still more
emphatically must the true patriarchal chieftain be merely the
administrator of a common fund.

The examples of succession by Primogeniture which were found among the
Benefices may, therefore, have been imitated from a system of
family-government known to the invading