Of the Greeks, our intellectual ancestors, as well as fellow Aryans, it is stated that in Attica, even to a late period, the land remained to a large degree in possession of ideal persons, gods, phylæ (tribes) or phratries, kinships, political communities. Even when the superficies of the land might be regarded as private, mines were reserved as public.[3] The basis on which these kinship groups rested is thus stated by Grote:[4] "All these phratric and gentile associations, the larger as well as the smaller, were founded upon the same principles and tendencies of the Grecian mind--a coalescence of the idea of worship with that of ancestry, or of communion in certain special religious rites with communion of blood, real or supposed." "The god or hero, to whom the assembled members offered their sacrifices, was conceived as the primitive ancestor to whom they owed their origin." Coulanges gives a similar statement as to the ancient family group:[5] "The members of the ancient family were united by something more powerful than birth, affection, or physical strength; this was the religion of the sacred fire, and of dead ancestors. This caused the family to form a single body both in this life and in the next." Finally, the following passage on clanship among the Kafirs brings out two points: (1) That such a group life implies feelings and ideas of a distinctive sort; and (2) that it has a strength rooted in the very necessities of life. "A Kafir feels that the 'frame that binds him in' extends to the clan. The sense of solidarity of the family in Europe is thin and feeble compared to the full-blooded sense of corporate union of the Kafir clan. The claims of the clan entirely swamp the rights of the individual. The system of tribal solidarity, which has worked so well in its smoothness that it might satisfy the utmost dreams of the socialist, is a standing proof of the sense of corporate union of the clan. In olden days a man did not have any feeling of personal injury when a chief made him work for white men and then told him to give all, or nearly all of his wages to his chief; the money was kept within the clan, and what was the good of the clan was the good of the individual and _vice versa_. The striking thing about this unity of the clan is that it was not a thought-out plan imposed from without by legislation upon an unwilling people, but it was a _felt-out_ plan which arose spontaneously along the line of least resistance. If one member of the clan suffered, all the members suffered, not in sentimental phraseology, but in real fact." (DUDLEY KIDD, _Savage Childhood_, pp. 74 f.)