We also find it in the Mongolian oulous, the Kabyle thaddart, the Javanese dessa, the Malayan kota or tofa, and under a variety of names in Abyssinia, the Soudan, in the interior of Africa, with natives of both Americas, with all the small and large tribes of the Pacific archipelagoes.  In short, we do not know one single human race or one single nation which has not had its period of village communities.  This fact alone disposes of the theory according to which the village community in Europe would have been a servile growth.  It is anterior to serfdom, and even servile submission was powerless to break it.  It was a universal phase of evolution, a natural outcome of the clan organization, with all those stems, at least, which have played, or play still, some part in history.(4)

It was a natural growth, and an absolute uniformity in its structure was therefore not possible.  As a rule, it was a union between families considered as of common descent and owning a certain territory in common.  But with some stems, and under certain circumstances, the families used to grow very numerous before they threw off new buds in the shape of new families; five, six, or seven generations continued to live under the same roof, or within the same enclosure, owning their joint household and cattle in common, and taking their meals at the common hearth.  They kept in such case to what ethnology knows as the “joint family,” or the “undivided household,” which we still see all over China, in India, in the South Slavonian zadruga, and occasionally find in Africa, in America, in Denmark, in North Russia, and West France.(5) With other stems, or in other circumstances, not yet well specified, the families did not attain the same proportions; the grandsons, and occasionally the sons, left the household as soon as they were married, and each of them started a new cell of his own.  But, joint or not, clustered together or scattered in the woods, the families remained united into village communities; several villages were grouped into tribes; and the tribes joined into confederations.  Such was the social organization which developed among the so-called “barbarians,” when they began to settle more or less permanently in Europe.

A very long evolution was required before the gentes, or clans, recognized the separate existence of a patriarchal family in a separate hut; but even after that had been recognized, the clan, as a rule, knew no personal inheritance of property.  The few things which might have belonged personally to the individual were either destroyed on his grave or buried with him.  The village community, on the contrary, fully recognized the private accumulation of wealth within the family and its hereditary transmission.  But wealth was conceived exclusively in the shape of movable property, including cattle, implements, arms, and the dwelling house which—­“like all things that can be destroyed by fire”—­belonged to the same category(6).  As to private property