ge tribe
falls to pieces through its own unwieldiness, because, by the nature
of things, it must be either deficient in centralisation or
straitened in food, or both. A barbarian population is obliged to
live dispersedly, since a square mile of land will support only a
few hunters or shepherds; on the other hand, a barbarian government
cannot be long maintained unless the chief is brought into frequent
contact with his dependants, and this is geographically impossible
when his tribe is so scattered as to cover a great extent of
territory. The law of selection must discourage every race of
barbarians which supplies self-reliant individuals in such large
numbers as to cause tribes of moderate size to lose their blind
desire of aggregation. It must equally discourage a breed that is
incompetent to supply such men in sufficiently abundant ratio to the
rest of the population to ensure the existence of tribes of not too
large a size. It must not be supposed that gregarious instincts are
equally important to all forms of savage life; but I hold, from what
we know of the clannish fighting habits of our forefathers, that
they were every whit as applicable to the earlier ancestors of our
European stock as they are still to a large part of the black
population of Africa.

There is, moreover, an extraordinary power of tyranny invested in
the chiefs of tribes and nations of men, that so vastly outweighs
the analogous power possessed by the leaders of animal herds as to
rank as a special attribute of human society, eminently conducive to
slavishness. If any brute in a herd makes itself obnoxious to the
leader, the leader attacks him, and there is a free fight between the
two, the other animals looking on the while. But if a man makes
himself obnoxious to his chief, he is attacked, not by the chief
single-handed, but by the overpowering force of his executive. The
rebellious individual has to brave a disciplined host; there are
spies who will report his doings, a local authority who will send a
detachment of soldiers to drag him to trial; there are prisons ready
built to hold him, civil authorities wielding legal powers of
stripping him of all his possessions, and official executioners
prepared to torture or kill him. The tyrannies under which men have
lived, whether under rude barbarian chiefs, under the great
despotisms of half-civilised Oriental countries, or under some of
the more polished but little less severe governments of m