Lewis Henry Morgan

“ As a growth with the ages of time, it has shared in all the vicissitudes of human experience, and now reveals more expressively, perhaps, than any other institution, the graduated scale of human progress from the abyss of primitive savagery, through barbarism, to civilization. It brings us near to the daily life of the human family in the different epochs of its progressive development, indicating, in some measure, its hardships, its struggles and also its victories, when different periods are contrasted. ”

“ Language had attained such development that poetry of the highest structural form was about to embody the inspirations of genius. The closing period of barbarism brought this portion of the human family to the threshold of civilization, animated by the great attainments of the past, grown hardy and intelligent in the school of experience, and with the undisciplined imagination in the full splendor of its creative powers. Barbarism ends with the production of grand barbarians. ”

“ Under the military democracy of Romulus, under the mixed democratical and aristocratical organization of the republic, and under the later imperialism it was a government with a great city in its centre, a perpetual nucleus, to which all additions by conquest were added as increments, instead of being made, with the city, common constituents of the government. Nothing precisely like this Roman organization, this Roman power, and the career of the Roman race, has appeared in the experience of mankind. It will ever remain the marvel of the ages. ”

“ It is by tracing these institutions from the germ through their successive stages of growth, on the wide scale of the tribes and nations of mankind, that we can follow the great movements of the human mind in its evolution from its infancy in savagery to its present high development. Out of the necessities of mankind for the organization of society came the gens; out of the gens came the chief, and the tribe with its council of chiefs; out of the tribe came by segmentation the group of tribes, afterwards re-united in a confederacy, and finally consolidated by coalescence into a nation ”

“ The history of the human race is one in source, one in experience, and one in progress.
It is both a natural and a proper desire to learn, if possible, how all these ages upon ages of past time have been expended by mankind; how savages, advancing by slow, almost imperceptible steps, attained the higher condition of barbarians; how barbarians, by similar progressive advancement, finally attained to civilization; and why other tribes and nations have been left behind in the race of progress—some in civilization, some in barbarism, and others in savagery. ”

“ Gentilism is a tie by itself; distinct from the family ties, but presupposing their existence and extending them by an artificial analogy, partly founded in religious belief, and partly on positive compact, so as to comprehend strangers in blood. All the members of one gens, or even of one phratry, believed themselves to be sprung, not indeed from the same grandfather or great-grandfather, but from the same divine or heroic ancestor.... ”

“ The arts, inventions and institutions named represent nearly the sum of the acquisitions of mankind in savagery, with the exception of the marvelous progress in language. In the aggregate it seems small, but it was immense potentially; because it embraced the rudiments of language, of government, of the family, of religion, of house architecture and of property, together with the principal germs of the arts of life. All these their descendants wrought out more fully in the period of barbarism, and their civilized descendants are still perfecting. ”

“ The Indian tribes had not advanced far enough in a knowledge of government to develop the idea of a chief executive magistrate. The Iroquois tribe recognized no head-chief, and the confederacy no executive officer. The elective tenure of the office of chief, and the liability of the person to deposition, settle the character of the office.
A council of Indian chiefs is of little importance by itself; but as the germ of the modern parliament, congress, and legislature, it has an important bearing in the history of mankind. ”

“ Those writers who have investigated the origin of society philosophically, found it difficult to conceive of its existence apart from the family as its unit, or of the family itself as other than monogamian. They also found it necessary to regard the married pair as the nucleus of a group of persons, a part of whom were servile, and all of whom were under power; thus arriving at the conclusion that society began in the patriarchal family, when it first became organized. Such, in fact, was the most ancient form of the institution made known to us among the Latin, Grecian and Hebrew tribes. ”

“ The rise of the Roman power upon gentile institutions was a remarkable event in human experience. It is not singular that the incidents that accompanied the movement should have come to us tinctured with romance, not to say enshrouded in fable. Rome came into existence through a happy conception, ascribed to Romulus, and adopted by his successors, of concentrating the largest possible number of gentes in a new city, under one government, and with their united military forces under one commander. ”

“ No argument for the unity of origin of mankind can be made, which, in its nature, is more satisfactory. A common principle of intelligence meets us in the savage, in the barbarian, and in civilized man. It was in virtue of this that mankind were able to produce in similar conditions the same implements and utensils, the same inventions, and to develop similar institutions from the same original germs of thought. There is something grandly impressive in a principle which has wrought out civilization by assiduous application from small beginnings ”

“ It must be regarded as a marvelous fact that a portion of mankind five thousand years ago, less or more, attained to civilization. In strictness but two families, the Semitic and the Aryan, accomplished the work through unassisted self-development. The Aryan family represents the central stream of human progress, because it produced the highest type of mankind, and because it has proved its intrinsic superiority by gradually assuming the control of the earth. And yet civilization must be regarded as an accident of circumstances. ”

“ The cruelty inherent in the heart of man, which civilization and Christianity have softened without eradicating, still betrays the savage origin of mankind, and in no way more pointedly than in the practice of human slavery, through all the centuries of recorded history. With the establishment of the inheritance of property in the children of its owner, came the first possibility of a strict monogamian family. Gradually, though slowly, this form of marriage, with an exclusive cohabitation, became the rule rather than the exception ”

“ House architecture, which connects itself with the form of the family and the plan of domestic life, affords a tolerably complete illustration of progress from savagery to civilization. Its growth can be traced from the hut of the savage, through the communal houses of the barbarians, to the house of the single family of civilized nations, with all the successive links by which one extreme is connected with the other. ”

“ The hindrances that held mankind in savagery were great, and surmounted with difficulty. After reaching the Middle Status of barbarism, civilization hung in the balance while barbarians were feeling their way, by experiments with the native metals, toward the process of smelting iron ore. Until iron and its uses were known, civilization was impossible. If mankind had failed to the present hour to cross this barrier, it would have afforded no just cause for surprise. ”

“ Out of a few germs of thought, conceived in the early ages, have been evolved all the principal institutions of mankind. Beginning their growth in the period of savagery, fermenting through the period of barbarism, they have continued their advancement through the period of civilization. ”

“ One of the oldest and most widely prevalent institutions of mankind, the gentes have been closely identified with human progress upon which they have exercised a powerful influence. They have been found in tribes in the Status of savagery, in the Lower, in the Middle, and in the Upper Status of barbarism on different continents, and in full vitality in the Grecian and Latin tribes after civilization had commenced. Every family of mankind, except the Polynesian, seems to have come under the gentile organization, and to have been indebted to it for preservation, and for the means of progress. ”

“ Mankind may be traced by a chain of necessary inferences back to a time when, ignorant of fire, without articulate language, and without artificial weapons, they depended, like the wild animals, upon the spontaneous fruits of the earth. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, they advanced through savagery, from gesture language and imperfect sounds to articulate speech ”

“ These results alone will in time yield convincing proofs of the unity of origin of mankind. The mental history of the human race, which is revealed in institutions, inventions and discoveries, is presumptively the history of a single species, perpetuated through individuals, and developed through experience. Among the original germs of thought, which have exercised the most powerful influence upon the human mind, and upon human destiny, are these which relate to government, to the family, to language, to religion, and to property. ”

“ Mankind owe a debt of gratitude to their savage ancestors for devising an institution able to carry the advancing portion of the human race out of savagery into barbarism, and through the successive stages of the latter into civilization. ”

“ An American, educated in the principles of democracy, and profoundly impressed with the dignity and grandeur of those great conceptions which recognize the liberty, equality and fraternity of mankind, may give free expression to a preference for self-government and free institutions. ”

“ The antiquity of mankind upon the earth is now established by a body of evidence sufficient to convince unprejudiced minds. The existence of the race goes back definitely to the glacial period in Europe, and even back of it into the anterior period. We are now compelled to recognize the prolonged and unmeasured ages of man’s existence. The human mind is naturally and justly curious to know something of the life of man during the last hundred thousand or more years, now that we are assured his days have been so long upon the earth. ”

“ Commencing probably with the dog as a companion in the hunt, followed at a later period by the capture of the young of other animals and rearing them, not unlikely, from the merest freak of fancy, it required time and experience to discover the utility of each, to find means of raising them in numbers and to learn the forbearance necessary to spare them in the face of hunger. Could the special history of the domestication of each animal be known, it would exhibit a series of marvelous facts. The experiment carried, locked up in its doubtful chances, much of the subsequent destiny of mankind. ”

“ All registered citizens were free, and equal in their rights and privileges, with the exception of equal eligibility to the higher offices. Such was the new unit of organization in Athenian political society, at once a model for a free state, and a marvel of wisdom and knowledge. The Athenians commenced with a democratic organization at the point where every people must commence who desire to create a free state, and place the control of the government in the hands of its citizens. ”

“ A necessity for some knowledge of the institutions of barbarous and even of savage tribes, is becoming constantly more apparent as a means for explaining our own institutions. With the assumption made that the monogamian family was the unit of organization in the social system, the gens was treated as an aggregation of families, the tribe as an aggregation of gentes, and the nation as an aggregate of tribes. ”

“ On the contrary, an Indian chief holds an office, not by hereditary right, but by election from a constituency, which retained the right to depose him for cause. The office carried with it the obligation to perform certain duties for the benefit of the constituency. He had no authority over the persons or property or lands of the members of the gens. It is thus seen that no analogy exists between a lord and his title, and an Indian chief and his office. One belongs to political society, and represents an aggression of the few upon the many ”

“ There is not a fact to show that any portion of the aborigines, at least in North America, had reached any conception of the second great plan of government founded upon territory and upon property. The spirit of the government and the condition of the people harmonize with the institutions under which they live. When the military spirit predominates, as it did among the Aztecs, a military democracy rises naturally under gentile institutions. Such a government neither supplants the free spirit of the gentes, nor weakens the principles of democracy, but accords with them harmoniously. ”

“ When the advantages of a union had been appreciated by actual experience the organization, at first a league, would gradually cement into a federal unity. The state of perpetual warfare in which they lived would quicken this natural tendency into action among such tribes as were sufficiently advanced in intelligence and in the arts of life to perceive its benefits. It would be simply a growth from a lower into a higher organization by an extension of the principle which united the gentes in a tribe. ”

“ As it is undeniable that portions of the human family have existed in a state of savagery, other portions in a state of barbarism, and still other portions in a state of civilization, it seems equally so that these three distinct conditions are connected with each other in a natural as well as necessary sequence of progress. ”

“ Ancient society rested upon an organization of persons, and was governed through the relations of persons to a gens and tribe; but the Grecian tribes were outgrowing this old plan of government, and began to feel the necessity of a political system. To accomplish this result it was only necessary to invent a deme or township, circumscribed with boundaries, to christen it with a name, and organize the people therein as a body politic. ”

“ While every person is a party to the system, the channel of its transmission is the blood. Powerful influences thus existed to perpetuate the system long after the conditions under which each originated had been modified or had altogether disappeared. This element of permanence gives certainty to conclusions drawn from the facts, and has preserved and brought forward a record of ancient society which otherwise would have been entirely lost to human knowledge. ”