ndifference, he regarded the old
inhabitants as an inferior species of mankind.... In
the new states on the Ganges therefore the population
was separated into two sharply divided masses. How
could the conquerors mix with the conquered? How could
their pride stoop to any union with the despised
servants?"[432]

These two divided masses thus so clearly described were, in fact,
tribesmen and non-tribesmen, just that distinction which we meet with
in Celtic and Teutonic law, and described in the same terms which
Bishop Stubbs was obliged to use when he set forth the facts of the
Teutonic invasion of Britain.

The terms are indeed necessary terms. Tribesmen capable of retaining
the tribal organisation during the period of migration and conquest
did not lightly lose that organisation when they settled. In Sir
Alfred Lyall's pure genealogic clan of Central India[433] I recognise
the unbroken tribal formation before the family group has arisen as a
political unit. In Mr. Tupper's argument against the conclusions of
Sir Henry Maine I recognise the Hindu evidence that the tribe was the
earliest social group, breaking up, as later influences arose, into
village communities and joint families.[434] In Bishop Stubbs's
masterly analysis of English constitutional history the tribe appears
at the outset--"the invaders," he says, "came in families and kindreds
and in the full organisation of their tribes ... the tribe was as
complete when it had removed to Kent as when it stayed in Jutland; the
magistrate was the ruler of the tribe not of the soil; the divisions
were those of the folk and the host not of the land; the laws were the
usage of the nation not of the territory."[435] And so I agree with
Mr. Skene as to the Celtic tribe that "the tuath or tribe preceded the
fine or clan,"[436] and with the editors of the Irish law tracts that
"the tribe existed before the family came into being and continued to
exist after the latter had been dissolved."[437]

We need not go beyond this evidence. The tribe is the common form into
which the early Indo-European peoples grouped themselves for the
purpose of conquest and settlement. It was their primal unit. It may
have been numerically large or small. It may have been the result of
a combination of many smaller tribes into one great tribe. But in any
case and under any conditions there stands out the tribal
organisation, that great institutional force from