most as they change their clothes, societies react far
more slowly; at the pace, in fact, usually of their most obstinate
members. Confronted therefore with the opportunity, or the need, for a
change of habit, in the course of a migration for example, they must
either refuse it, like a shy horse, or (if they accept it) enter on
their new career imperfectly trained, and extemporizing adjustments here
and there in very unworkmanlike fashion. Only rarely does the statesman
or 'lawgiver' appear, just when he is wanted, to bring Israel up out of
Egypt into the desert, and out of the desert into the good land beyond
Jordan, and to canonize a new code of behaviour suited to a new set of
needs. This social inertia, of which political history is the sorry
record, is of course least perceptible, and most effective, when the
region of transition is graduated gently; and we have already seen that
this is conspicuously so around the parkland margin of the northern
grassland, where it faces on peninsular Europe. Let us follow this clue
in detail.

We may safely assume, as we have seen, that for a long while past, every
group of newcomers into peninsular Europe has come equipped with the
particular type of social organization which enabled it to make good,
either on the tundra, or in the northern woodland, or on the steppe, or
(if it came across the Bosphorus) on the enclosed plateaux of Asia Minor
and beyond. The tundra does not greatly concern us, for the White Sea
cuts through it, and deep into the woodland, and bars off the Lapps from
the Samoyeds and their kin. Classical descriptions of the inhabitants of
the North German plain make it clear that its culture, even so late as
the first century B.C., was at its best a broken prolongation of the
pastoral life of the steppe margin, and that less fortunate tribes
either had never had cattle, like the hunting Redskins of the
corresponding forest zone of North America, or had lost them since they
entered the forest, and maintained themselves by hunting and robbery
like the broken pastorals who infest the east edge of the Congo basin;
the Chatti of Tacitus' day enjoying tyrannous hegemony not unlike that
of the Five Nations.

It is probably to this westward drift from more purely pastoral
condition to less, that we must attribute the only really large unity of
European civilization in the later prehistoric ages, namely, its social
organization in patriarchal households linked into clans