Political institutions by Herbert Spencer

Author:Herbert Spencer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: D. Appleton and company

And now we are prepared for observing sundry influences which conspire to change the grouping of kindred into political grouping, locally as well as generally. In the first place, there is that admission of strangers into the family, gens, or tribe, which we have before recognized as a normal process, from savage life upwards. Livingstone, remarking of the Bakwains that "the government is patriarchal," describes each chief man as having his hut encircled by the huts of his wives, relatives, and dependents, forming a kotla: "a poor man attaches himself to the kotla of a rich one and is considered a child of the latter." Here we see being done informally, that which was formally done in the Eoman household and the Teutonic mark. In proportion as the adopted strangers increase, and in proportion also as the cluster becomes diluted by incorporating with itself emancipated dependents, the links among its members become weakened and its character altered. In the second place, when, by concentration and multiplication, different clusters of kindred placed side by side, become interspersed, and there ceases to be a direct connexion between locality and kinship, the family or gentile bonds are further weakened. And then there eventually results, both for military and fiscal purposes, the need for a grouping based on locality instead of on relationship. An early illustration is furnished by the Kleisthenian revolution in Attica, which made a division of the territory into demes, replacing for public purposes tribal divisions by topographical divisions, the inhabitants of each of which had local administrative powers and public responsibilities.

We are here brought to the vexed question about the origin of tythings and hundreds. It was pointed out that the ancient Peruvians had civil as well as military divisions into tens and hundreds, with their respective officers. In China, where there is pushed to an extreme the principle of making groups responsible for their members, the clan-divisions are not acknowledged by the government, but only the tythings and hundreds: the implication being that these last were results of political organization as distinguished from family-organization. In parts of Japan, too, " there is a sort of subordinate system of wards, and heads of tens and hundreds, in the Otonos of towns and villages, severally and collectively responsible for each other's good conduct." We have seen that in Eome, the groupings into hundreds and tens, civil as well as military, became political substitutes for the gentile groupings. Under the Frankish law, "the tythingman is Decanus, the hundred-man Centenarius;" and whatever may have been their indigenous names, divisions into tens and hundreds appear to have had (judging from the statements of Tacitus) an independent origin among the Germanic races.

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