germ for a campaigning nation. In a Roman family the boys, from the
time of their birth, were bred to a domestic despotism, which well
prepared them for a subjection in after life to a military
discipline, a military drill, and a military despotism. They were
ready to obey their generals because they were compelled to obey
their fathers; they centered the world in manhood because as
children they were bred in homes where the tradition of passionate
valour was steadied by the habit of implacable order. And nothing of
this is possible in loosely-bound family groups (if they can be
called families at all) where the father is more or less uncertain,
where descent is not traced through him, where, that is, property
does not come from him, where such property as he has passes to his
SURE relations--to his sister's children. An ill-knit nation which
does not recognise paternity as a legal relation, would be conquered
like a mob by any other nation which had a vestige or a beginning of
the patria potestas. If, therefore, all the first men had the strict
morality of families, they would no more have permitted the rise of
SEMI-moral nations anywhere in the world than the Romans would have
permitted them to arise in Italy. They would have conquered, killed,
and plundered them before they became nations; and yet semi-moral
nations exist all over the world.

It will be said that this argument proves too much. For it proves
that not only the somewhat-before-history men, but the absolutely
first men, could not have had close family instincts, and yet if
they were like most though not all of the animals nearest to man
they had such instincts. There is a great story of some African
chief who expressed his disgust at adhering to one wife, by saying
it was 'like the monkeys.' The semi-brutal ancestors of man, if they
existed, had very likely an instinct of constancy which the African