rope and Asia, where different strata
of ideas and institutions have been superimposed one upon another and
crumpled and distorted with as little apparent significance or purpose
as the porches and gables of a so-called "Queen Anne" house.[84]
Conquest in the Old World has resulted in the commingling and manifold
fusion of peoples in very different stages of development. In the New
World there has been very little of that sort of thing. Conquest in
ancient America was pretty much all of the Iroquois type, entailing in
its milder form the imposition of tribute, in its more desperate form
the extermination of a tribe with the adoption of its remnants into the
similarly-constituted tribe of the conquerors. There was therefore but
little modification of the social structure while the people, gradually
acquiring new arts, were passing through savagery and into a more or
less advanced stage of barbarism. The symmetry of the structure and the
relation of one institution to another is thus distinctly apparent.

[Footnote 84: For instance, the whole discussion in Gomme's
_Village Community_, London, 1890, an excellent book, abounds
with instances of this crumpling.]

The communal household and the political structure built upon it, as
above described in the case of the Iroquois, seem to have existed all
over ancient North America, with agreement in fundamental
characteristics and variation in details and degree of development.
There are many corners as yet imperfectly explored, but hitherto, in so
far as research has been rewarded with information, it all points in the
same general direction. Among the tribes above enumerated as either in
savagery or in the lower status of barbarism, so far as they have been
studied, there seems to be a general agreement, as to the looseness of
the marriage tie the clan with descent in the female line, the phratry,
the tribe, the officers and councils, the social equality, the community
in goods (with exceptions already noted), and the wigwam or house
adapted to communal living.

[Illustration: View, Cross-section, and Ground-plan of Mandan round
house.]

[Sidenote: Circular houses of the Mandans.]

The extreme of variation consistent with adherence to the common
principle was to be found in the shape and material of the houses. Those
of the savage tribes were but sorry huts. The long house was used by the
Powhatans and other Algonquin tribes. The other most highl