mingling with strangers offered singular facilities for the ultimate disintegration of those unions which were based upon kinship.  The barbarians thus stood in a position of either seeing their clans dissolved into loose aggregations of families, of which the wealthiest, especially if combining sacerdotal functions or military repute with wealth, would have succeeded in imposing their authority upon the others; or of finding out some new form of organization based upon some new principle.

Many stems had no force to resist disintegration:  they broke up and were lost for history.  But the more vigorous ones did not disintegrate.  They came out of the ordeal with a new organization—­ the village community—­which kept them together for the next fifteen centuries or more.  The conception of a common territory, appropriated or protected by common efforts, was elaborated, and it took the place of the vanishing conceptions of common descent.  The common gods gradually lost their character of ancestors and were endowed with a local territorial character.  They became the gods or saints of a given locality; “the land” was identified with its inhabitants.  Territorial unions grew up instead of the consanguine unions of old, and this new organization evidently offered many advantages under the given circumstances.  It recognized the independence of the family and even emphasized it, the village community disclaiming all rights of interference in what was going on within the family enclosure; it gave much more freedom to personal initiative; it was not hostile in principle to union between men of different descent, and it maintained at the same time the necessary cohesion of action and thought, while it was strong enough to oppose the dominative tendencies of the minorities of wizards, priests, and professional or distinguished warriors.  Consequently it became the primary cell of future organization, and with many nations the village community has retained this character until now.

It is now known, and scarcely contested, that the village community was not a specific feature of the Slavonians, nor even of the ancient Teutons.  It prevailed in England during both the Saxon and Norman times, and partially survived till the last century;(3) it was at the bottom of the social organization of old Scotland, old Ireland, and old Wales.  In France, the communal possession and the communal allotment of arable land by the village folkmote persisted from the first centuries of our era till the times of Turgot, who found the folkmotes “too noisy” and therefore abolished them.  It survived Roman rule in Italy, and revived after the fall of the Roman Empire.  It was the rule with the Scandinavians, the Slavonians, the Finns (in the pittaya, as also, probably, the kihla-kunta), the Coures, and the lives.  The village community in India—­past and present, Aryan and non-Aryan—­is well known through the epoch-making works of Sir Henry Maine; and Elphinstone has described it among the Afghans.