The Political Institutions of the Ancient GreeksHammond, Basil Edward
History
The Political Institutions of the Ancient Greeks
Hammond, Basil Edward
Greece -- Politics and government; Political science
From the condition in which the Aryans lived we may safely infer that
they were not totally devoid of political institutions. All men live
under government except a few to whom government is either impossible
or useless. The multitude of uncivilised races who inhabit or have
inhabited the earth may be divided into two great classes; the first
and lower class consisting of those who depend for subsistence solely
on wild plants and wild animals, the second and upper class comprising
all those who, in addition to the wild fruits that they may gather and
the wild animals that they may kill, also have tame cattle to supply
them with flesh and milk or cultivated plants that produce grain. The
lower class are known either as savages or as hunting peoples: the
upper, for want of a better name, may be designated as barbarians. In
the lower class, the savages and hunting peoples, a very small number
of peoples are found who have been prevented by specially adverse
circumstances from having any governments: but in the rest of the lower
class and in all the upper class of uncivilised peoples the existence
of some kind of government is universal.
In illustration and proof of these statements some facts may be cited.
The Bushmen of South Africa were at the beginning of the present
century a race of savages who wandered over an arid sloping plain that
lies to the South of the Orange River. They just contrived to maintain
a miserable existence on the roots that they could grub up and on the
flesh of animals that they shot with poisoned arrows or entrapped in
pitfalls: but, as every family was compelled to keep itself isolated
from all neighbours in order to have enough to eat, government was
impossible. Other races resembling the Bushmen in the isolation of
their families and in having no government are the Rock Veddahs in
Ceylon and the Digger Indians in California. A slightly different case
occurs in the regions near the North Pole. The Esquimaux, who live
by catching seals and other marine animals, are not precluded from
grouping their huts in small clusters: but nature offers so little
reward to any combined effort of a large number of men that they have
never cared to form political communities: and they afford perhaps
the only example of human beings living as neighbours but without
government. Leaving these very exceptional cases, we next observe a
group of hunting peoples with whom nature dealt less unkindly. Some
forty years ago, almost the only inhabitants of the western part of
British North America, now known as Manitoba, were a number of Red
Indian tribes who supported themselves entirely by the chase, killing
buffalo for food and other animals for their furs, which they passed on
to traders in return for such commodities as the traders brought them.
During the greater part of the year each Red Indian family wandered
almost as much apart from communication with mankind as did the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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