f unrecorded centuries during which
the foremost races of mankind struggled up through savagery and
barbarism into civilization, while weaker and duller races lagged behind
at various stages on the way. The change from "gentile" society to
political society as we know it was in some respects the most important
change that has occurred in human affairs since men became human. It
might be roughly defined as the change from personal to territorial
organization. It was accomplished when the stationary clan became
converted into the township, and the stationary tribe into the small
state;[101] when the conception of individual property in land was fully
acquired; when the tie of physical kinship ceased to be indispensable as
a bond for holding a society together; when the _clansman_ became a
_citizen_. This momentous change was accomplished among the Greeks
during a period beginning shortly before the first Olympiad (B. C.
776), and ending with the reforms of Kleisthenes at Athens (B. C. 509);
among the Romans it was accomplished by the series of legislative
changes beginning with those ascribed to Servius Tullius (about B. C.
550), and perfected by the time of the first Punic War (B. C. 264-241).
In each case about three centuries was required to work the change.[102]
If now the reader, familiar with European history, will reflect upon the
period of more than a thousand years which intervened between the date
last named and the time when feudalism became thoroughly established, if
he will recall to mind the vast and powerful complication of causes
which operated to transform civil society from the aspect which it wore
in the days of Regulus and the second Ptolemy to that which it had
assumed in the times of Henry the Fowler or Fulk of Anjou, he will begin
to realize how much "feudalism" implies, and what a wealth of experience
it involves, above and beyond the change from "gentile" to "civil"
society. It does not appear that any people in ancient America ever
approached very near to this earlier change. None had fairly begun to
emerge from gentilism; none had advanced so far as the Greeks of the
first Olympiad or the Romans under the rule of the Tarquins.

[Footnote 100: When Pocahontas visited London in 1616 she was
received at court as befitted a "king's daughter," and the old
Virginia historian, William Stith (born in 1689), says it was a
"constant tradition" in his day that James I. "b