races, though not in general
use. Some ruder tribes may have still practised it, or, what is still
more probable, society may have been so slightly removed from its more
archaic condition that the minds of some men spontaneously recurred to
it, when they were called upon to settle the rules of inheritance for
a new form of property. But there is still the question, Why did
Primogeniture gradually supersede every other principle of succession?
The answer, I think, is, that European society decidedly retrograded
during the dissolution of the Carlovingian empire. It sank a point or
two back even from the miserably low degree which it had marked during
the early barbarian monarchies. The great characteristic of the
period was the feebleness, or rather the abeyance, of kingly and
therefore of civil authority; and hence it seems as if, civil society
no longer cohering, men universally flung themselves back on a social
organisation older than the beginnings of civil communities. The lord
with his vassals, during the ninth and tenth centuries, may be
considered as a patriarchal household, recruited, not as in the
primitive times by Adoption, but by Infeudation; and to such a
confederacy, succession by Primogeniture was a source of strength and
durability. So long as the land was kept together on which the entire
organisation rested, it was powerful for defence and attack; to divide
the land was to divide the little society, and voluntarily to invite
aggression in an era of universal violence. We may be perfectly
certain that into this preference for Primogeniture there entered no
idea of disinheriting the bulk of the children in favour of one.
Everybody would have suffered by the division of the fief. Everybody
was a gainer by its consolidation. The Family grew stronger by the
concentration of power in the same hands; nor is it likely that the
lord who was invested with the inheritance had any advantage over his
brethren and kinsfolk in occupations, interests, or indulgences. It
would be a singular anachronism to estimate the privileges succeeded
to by the heir of a fief, by the situation in which the eldest son is
placed under an English strict settlement.

I have said that I regard the early feudal confederacies as descended
from an archaic form of the Family, and as wearing a strong
resemblance to it. But then in the ancient world, and in the societies
which have not passed through the crucible of feudalism, the
Primogenitu