ershadowed by the family, so that kinship, with its
rights and duties, becomes practically limited to the nearer
blood-relations; who, moreover, begin to be treated for practical
purposes as kinsmen, even when they are on the side of the family which
lineage does not officially recognize. Thus the forms of natal
association no longer constitute the backbone of the body politic.
Their public importance has gone. Henceforward, the social unit is
the local group. The territorial principle comes more and more to
determine affinities and functions. Kinship has dethroned itself by
its very success. Thanks to the organizing power of kinship, primitive
society has grown, and by growing has stretched the birth-tie until
it snaps. Some relationships become distant in a local and territorial
sense, and thereupon they cease to count. My duty towards my kin passes
into my duty towards my neighbour.

* * * * *

Reasons of space make it impossible to survey the further developments
to which social organization is subject under the sway of locality.
It is, perhaps, less essential to insist on them here, because, whereas
totemic society is a thing which we civilized folk have the very
greatest difficulty in understanding, we all have direct insight into
the meaning of a territorial arrangement; since, from the village
community up to the modern state, the same fundamental type of social
structure obtains throughout.

Besides local contiguity, however, there is a second principle which
greatly helps to shape the social order, as soon as society is
sufficiently advanced in its arts and industries to have taken firm
root, so to speak, on the earth's surface. This is the principle of
private property, and especially of private property in land. The most
fundamental of class distinctions is that between rich and poor. That
between free and slave, in communities that have slavery, is not at
first sight strictly parallel, since there may be a class of poor
freemen intermediate between the nobles and the slaves; but it is
obvious that in this case, too, private property is really responsible
for the mode of grading. Or sometimes social position may seem to depend
primarily on industrial occupation, the Indian caste-system providing
an instance in point. Since, however, the most honourable occupations
in the long run coincide with those that pay best, we come back once
again to private property as the ultimate s