red years and still live. I have described it more fully after
Morgan, because we have here an opportunity for studying the
organization of a society that does not yet know a state. The state
presupposes a public power of coercion separated from the aggregate
body of its members. Maurer, with correct intuition, recognized the
constitution of the German Mark as a purely social institution,
essentially different from that of a state, though furnishing the
fundament on which a state constitution could be erected later on. Hence
in all of his writings, he traced the gradual rise of the public power
of coercion from and by the side of primordial constitutions of marks,
villages, farms and towns. The North American Indians show how an
originally united tribe gradually spreads over an immense continent; how
tribes by segmentation become nations, whole groups of tribes; how
languages change so that they not only become unintelligible to one
another, but also lose every trace of former unity; how at the same time
one gens splits up into several gentes, how the old mother gentes are
preserved in the phratries and how the names of these oldest gentes
still remain the same in widely distant and long separated tribes. Wolf
and bear still are gentile names in a majority of all Indian tribes. And
the above named constitution is essentially applicable to all of them,
except that many did not reach the point of forming leagues of related
tribes.

But once the gens was given as a social unit, we also see how the whole
constitution of gentes, phratries and tribes developed with almost
unavoidable necessity--because naturally--from the gens. All three of
them are groups of differentiated consanguine relations. Each is
complete in itself, arranges its own local affairs and supplements the
other groups. And the cycle of functions performed by them includes the
aggregate of the public affairs of men in the lower stage of barbarism.

Wherever we find the gens as the social unit of a nation, we are
justified in searching for a tribal organization similar to the one
described above. And whenever sufficient material is at hand, as in
Greek and Roman history, there we shall not only find such an
organization, but we may also be assured, that the comparison with the
American sex organizations will assist us in solving the most perplexing
doubts and riddles in places where the material forsakes us.

How wonderful this gentile constitution is in al