and tribes. We
may doubt whether this social type is permanently adaptable to a forest
regime, any more than to industrial life. Certainly forest folk outside
peninsular Europe only display it rarely and imperfectly. But it is
characteristic of all pastoral folk; once established, it coheres and
persists under great external stresses; and in early Europe its
liability (strong though its structure is) to break up sooner or later
into a more individualistic order, was counteracted by the recurrent
drift of new grassland peoples westward from one of its principal homes.
Grassland Arabia, let us note in passing, has been performing the same
function, since history began, for its own marginal neighbours from
Babylonia to Palestine and Egypt.

On the other hand, we now see why the feminism which recurs
intermittently in our 'western' world culminates in those phases of its
history when that world has been strong enough to close its avenues of
intrusion for a while; in the far past which has left us the great
goddesses and other matrilineal survivals; in industrial Babylonia; in
the Minoan palaces; in fifth-and fourth-century Greece, as Aristophanes
joins with Euripides to admit, and Euripides with Plato to advocate; in
the _Femmes savantes_ of renascent Europe; in eighteenth-century France,
which seemed to itself so impregnable; and in the _fin-de-siecle_ Europe
of yesterday, pulling down its barns to build greater.

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 Alb