So long as people continued to lead a wandering shepherd life, the institution of the patriarchal family afforded a sufficient and satisfactory basis for such cordial union as was possible. It was a condition of society in which the relations of the different members to each other were extremely simple and confined within very narrow boundaries; but these habits of life prevented the existence of any very complicated social order, and at the same time gave a peculiar force and endurance to those customs and ties which did exist. For while the different tribes had no settled dwelling-places, the only cohesion possible was that produced by the personal relations of the different members one to another. Those beyond the limits of the tribe or household could have no permanent connection with it. They were simply ‘strangers,’ friends or enemies, as circumstances might determine, but having no common interests, connected by no abiding link, with those who were not members of the same community. When a family became so numerous that it was necessary for its members to separate, the new family, formed under the influence of this pressure, would at first remember the parent stock with reverence, and perhaps regard the patriarch of the elder branch as entitled to some sort of obedience from, and possessing some indefinite kind of power over, it after separation. It would, however, soon wander away and lose all connection with its relatives, forgetting perhaps in the course of time whence it had sprung, or inventing a pedigree more pleasing to the vanity of its members. But when men began to learn to till the soil, by degrees they had to abandon their nomadic life, and to have for a time fixed dwelling-places, in order that they might guard their crops, and gather, in the time of harvest, the fruits of their labour. Cattle were no longer the only means of subsistence, nor sufficiency of pasture the only limit to migration. A part of their wealth was, for a time, bound up in the land which they had tilled and sowed, and to obtain that wealth they must remain in the neighbourhood of the cultivated soil. Thus a new relationship arose between different families. They began to have neighbours--dwellers on and cultivators of the land bordering their own,--so that common interests sprang up between those who hitherto had nothing in common, new ties began to connect together those who had formerly no fixed relationship.