No one would suggest that this patriarchal and tribal structure favoured political unity or large enterprises of any kind.  In fact, throughout the early history of Europe these coherent kinship groups, with their inner insulation and their inability to offer anything but passive resistance to the forces which were to dissolve them, were an insuperable bar to anything politically larger.  ’If only these could hold together, they would rule the world’ is the judgement of Herodotus on Scythia, of Thucydides on Thrace, of Polybius and Caesar upon Gaul, of Tacitus on Germany:  each with the unspoken afterthought ’but thank goodness that they cannot!’

But while it hindered larger growths of political structure, so long as it remained intact, and furnished a strong social skeleton upon which to frame manners and ideals which are among man’s highest achievements, patriarchal society had its own dangers, and has now so nearly succumbed to them, that to see its institutions in working order we have to penetrate into Albania or amongst the least modern backwoods of the Slav-speaking east.  To take only the leading instance, Greek tribal society dissolved within historic times under the double attack of individualism, industrial and commercial, at the one end, and of the federalism of the city state, at the other.  For Aristotle the village-community was the ‘colony’ ([Greek:  apoikia]) or direct offspring of the patriarchal household, but he nowhere admits the city-state to be the ‘colony’ of the village-community.  On the contrary, at the risk of upsetting his own theory of the state as a natural outgrowth of man’s political nature, he lays stress on ’the man who first introduced them to each other’ as the ’author of the greatest advantages’.  And it was precisely this process of ’introducing them to one another’, so that the members of hitherto autonomous clans became friends instead of enemies, and were thenceforth citizens all, in one and the same city-state, that terminated that period of migrations and political chaos which separates the Minoan from the Hellenic Age in Greek lands.  Rome’s mission among the tribal societies of Italy is essentially the same; and it is the lack of any such missionary of political enlightenment beyond the frontier of the Roman State in its imperial fullness, that makes early mediaeval problems, which were essentially the same, so slow to be solved.

We are now hard upon the borderland of history, and we take leave of a peninsular Europe—­for the grassland stands still outside, as a distinct geographic entity—­in which the diverse races, and languages, and religious schemes, and material cultures, are almost wholly propagated under the forms of societies of one homogeneous type, autonomous, indeed, like the states in the loosest of federations, and involved annually, somewhere or other, in intertribal feuds and war; but sufficiently acquainted with each other’s customs to know that they were based