here is no fact more certainly
true as a result of comparative research than that the tribe is the
common heritage of those people who have become the dominant rulers of
the Indo-European world. I use this term "tribe" in no formal sense,
not in the sense of its Roman derivation and use, which shows it quite
as a secondary institution, but as the most convenient term to define
that grouping of men with wives, families, and descendants, and all
the essentials of independent life, which is found as a primal unit of
European society in a state of unsettlement as regards land or
country. The tie which bound all together was personal not local,
kinship with a tribal god, kinship more or less real with
fellow-tribesmen, kinship in status and rights. We meet with this
tribal organisation everywhere in Indo-European history. It made
movement from country to country possible. It made conquest possible.
Celt and Teuton did not conquer in families any more than Greek or
Hindu did. They conquered in tribes, and it was because of the
strength of the tribal organisation during the period, first of
migration and wandering and then of conquest, that the settlement
after conquest was possible and was so strong. Everywhere we find
these people conquerors and settlers. In India, in Iran, in Greece and
Rome, in Scandinavia, in Celtic and Teutonic Europe, in Slavic Europe,
they are moving tribes of conquerors come to settle and rule the
people they conquer.[430] When Dr. Ridgeway asks whence came the
Acheans,[431] he answers the question much in the same fashion as that
in which Dr. Duncker describes the settlement on the Ganges:--

"The ancient population of the new states on the
Ganges was not entirely extirpated, expelled, or
enslaved. Life and freedom were allowed to those who
submitted and conformed to the law of the conqueror;
they might pass their lives as servants on the farms
of the Aryas (Manu, i. 91). But though the remnant of
this population was spared, the whole body of the
immigrants looked down on them with the pride of
conquerors--of superiority in arms, blood, and
character--and in contrast to them they called
themselves Vaicyas, i.e. tribesmen, comrades, in other
words those who belong to the community or body of
rulers. Whether the Vaicya belonged to the order of
the nobles, the minstrels and priests or peasants, was
a matter of i