or chief. But once outside the stockade
he can kill and plunder at will, though owing to the similarly strong
organisation of the next village he will usually reserve his predatory
exploits for the official and collective raids of village against
village and tribe against tribe.

Of course the family is a step leading up to the tribal stage of
morality, and it may be that the idea of incest marks the social stage
in which the moral sphere was conterminous with the family,
corresponding to the institution of exogamy in the moral system of the
tribe.

It may be added that even in the modern family the feeling which unites
the members often consists less, very much less, of affection than of a
sort of obligation to hang together for mutual defence.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 2: Cf. Plato's myth of Protagoras (_Prot_. 322 B ff.).]

Sec. 7

The City State

The City State, self-contained, self-supporting, truly democratic, is
marked by a similar pugnacity. Only full citizenship conferred full
moral rights, and any ferocity could be justified in war against another
city. Athens wore herself out in the long struggle with Sparta, and
Greece was lured to destruction by the devil of Imperialism, whose stock
argument is to suggest that a State can extend its rights without
extending its obligations. But the limitation of the moral sphere by the
boundaries of the city is less apparent in the Greek States, because in
the historical period at least they were already in transition to a
larger view, and enlightened opinion certainly believed in a moral
system which should include all Greek States, to the exclusion of course
of all "barbarians": but this larger view was even more definitely
limited, and the demarcation of those within from those outside the
moral sphere was never more sharply conceived, than in the difference
commonly held to exist between Greeks and Barbarians. Yet even so Greece
can maintain her pre-eminence in thought; for Plato and Euripides at
least glimpsed the conception, by which we do not yet consent to be
guided, of the moral equality of all mankind.[3]

For all these reasons the City State as a limited moral sphere is better
seen perhaps in Mediaeval Italy, where, I imagine, a Florentine might
kill a native of Pisa whenever he liked; whereas if he killed a fellow
Florentine he risked at least the necessity of putting himself outside
the moral sphere, of having that is to leave Florence and stay in Pisa