I now enter the third stage of my argument. In the first I cited and
discussed the various forms in which racial and national feelings are
manifested by various peoples abroad; in my second I dealt with the
nature of the various national movements at home. We now set out in
search of the root from which the flower of our complex modern
civilization has sprung. In the world of to-day we see many peoples
exhibiting every phase in the evolution of that organization which
permits mankind to live in massed populations. Fortunately for us there
yet survive, in outlandish parts of the earth, remnants of native races
retaining the primitive organization which guided mankind through that
great hinterland of time lying between the emergence from apedom and the
dawn of the modern world. For the student of sociology the immense
primitive first stage of man's history is by far the more important. In
his _Voyage of the Beagle_, Darwin draws a picture of the Fuegians which
gives us a real insight into the ancient state of social organization.
Spencer and Gillan supply us with complementary pictures representing
the conditions of life among native tribes of Central Australia. These
primitive peoples live on the natural produce of the territory which
they inhabit and claim as their own. Their social organization
represents for us the conditions in which the modern races of mankind
were evolved. It is in such primitive societies that there must have
existed the machinery which differentiated mankind into races and racial
breeds. It is in the long first phase that we must search for the origin
of the social impulses and tendencies which have come down to modern man
by inheritance.[1]
When we survey a country still in the most primitive stage of human
society, the first observation to impress us is the fact that its
inhabitants are separated into definitely isolated groups. Such groups
are usually small, consisting of men, women, and children belonging to
several closely related families and numbering two or three hundred
souls. Each group, forming an elemental community, occupies, and
considers itself the owner of, a definite tract of country; there is
developed in them a feeling--an attachment--which serves to bind them to
the soil on which they live. When we look at the nature of the bonds
which serve to bind the members of a primitive community together, we
see that they are formed out of subconscious impulses or instincts.
These instincts form an essential part of the machinery of organization.
There is usually no head man or chieftain to determine the action of
the community; there is no deliberative assembly to lay down rules of
conduct. In Galton's phrase the members of a primitive community form 'a
sentient web', dominated by traditional beliefs and customs. I have no
wish to analyse the subconscious states and instinctive reactions which
rule and bind together the members of a primitive community; what I want
to make clear is that the tribal instincts have above all an isolating
effect. These instincts serve not only as a machinery for binding the
members of a community together, but also as a means of separating them
from all surrounding groups. Within the community this machinery compels
unity of sentiment and of action; it serves to repress schism and
faction. But the tribal machinery is operative only up to the
territorial boundaries of the community. At that limit the tribal
instincts immediately change in their mode of action. The tribal
instincts surround the community with a frontier, across which there is
no peaceful traffic, only robbery and plunder; or at the best covert
enmity. The tribal frontier is also a blood barrier; across it the
tribal instinct forbids any form of peaceful matrimonial exchange or
tribal intermixture. Nothing impressed Darwin so much as the ring of
neutral territory which surrounded the primitive Fuegian settlements.