which spring all
later institutions. Its roots go back into the remotest past of
Indo-European history; its active force caused the Indo-European
people to become the mightiest in human history; its lasting results
have scarcely yet ceased to shape the aspirations of political society
and to affect the destinies of nations. The whole life of the early
period was governed by tribal conditions--the political, social,
legal, and even religious conceptions were tribal in form and
expression.

The tribal institution of the Aryan-speaking peoples includes a life
outside the tribe. That was an outlaw's life, a kinless outcast, whom
no tribesman would look upon or assist, whom every tribesman
considered as an enemy until he had reduced him to the position of
helot or slave, but for whom every tribe had a place in its
organisation and a legal status in its constitution. But it was the
legal status imposed by the master over the servant, and the kinless
included not only the outcast from the tribe, but the conquered
aboriginal who had never been within the tribe. It is important to
notice this, for it to some extent measures the strength of the tribal
organisation. It not only allowed for a special position for all
tribesmen, but it allowed for that position to have a definite
relationship to persons who were not tribesmen, and it is in the
combined forces of tribesmen and non-tribesmen that the tribal
organisation which swept over part of Asia and over all Europe obtains
its greatest power. There are tribal systems outside the Semitic and
the Indo-European, but these do not have the distinctive features that
the tribal systems of these two great civilising peoples possess. Like
the Semitic and Aryan tribal systems, savage tribes are fashioned for
conquest, but, unlike them, they are not fashioned for settlement and
resettlement, and perhaps again and again conquest and resettlement.
They spent all their power, or most of their power, in their one great
effort of conquest, and whether we turn to the American Indian tribes,
to the African tribes, or to the Asiatic tribes we find the same facts
of frequent dissipation of power after sudden and complete conquest of
it. The tribal system which led to civilisation has a different
history. It has, too, a different constitution in that to the strength
of tribesmen was added the subordination--politically, industrially,
and economically--of non-tribesmen. They were the people who, in t