n the Grecian constitution of heroic times, then, we still find the old
gentilism fully alive, but we also perceive the beginnings of the
elements that undermine it; paternal law and inheritance of property by
the father's children, favoring accumulation of wealth in the family and
giving to the latter a power apart from the gens; influence of the
difference of wealth on the constitution by the formation of the first
rudiments of hereditary nobility and monarchy; slavery, first limited to
prisoners of war, but already paving the way to the enslavement of
tribal and gentile associates; degeneration of the old feuds between
tribes a regular mode of existing by systematic plundering on land and
sea for the purpose of acquiring cattle, slaves, and treasures. In
short, wealth is praised and respected as the highest treasure, and the
old gentile institutions are abused in order to justify the forcible
robbery of wealth. Only one thing was missing: an institution that not
only secured the newly acquired property of private individuals against
the communistic traditions of the gens, that not only declared as sacred
the formerly so despised private property and represented the protection
of this sacred property as the highest purpose of human society, but
that also stamped the gradually developing new forms of acquiring
property, of constantly increasing wealth, with the universal sanction
of society. An institution that lent the character of perpetuity not
only to the newly rising division into classes, but also to the right of
the possessing classes to exploit and rule the non-possessing classes.

And this institution was found. The state arose.

FOOTNOTE:

[24] Author's note.

Just as the Grecian basileus, so the Aztec military chief was
misrepresented as a modern prince. Morgan was the first to submit to
historical criticism the reports of the Spaniards who first
misapprehended and exaggerated, and later on consciously misrepresented
the functions of this office. He showed that the Mexicans were in the
middle stage of barbarism, but on a higher plane than the New Mexican
Pueblo Indians, and that their constitution, so far as the garbled
accounts show, corresponded to this stage: a league of three tribes
which had made a number of others tributary and was administered by a
federal council and a federal chief of war, whom the Spaniards construed
into an "emperor."

CHAPTER V.

ORIGIN OF THE ATTIC STATE.

How t