With the facts at present accessible regarding peoples in the lower and middle stages of barbarism, the various steps in the growth of government as administered in the upper or latter stage of barbarism are clearly observed; also by close attention to the conditions surrounding extant peoples in the latter stage of barbarism and the opening ages of civilization, the processes involved in the transfer of society from gentile to political institutions are easily traced, together with the principal ideas and motives underlying the growth of all the institutions belonging to early historic nations. Until civilization was reached the gens constituted the unit of organized society. This fact, however, until a comparatively recent time, seems to have been overlooked. Without attempting to explain the origin of the gens and phratry as they existed in Greece, Mr. Grote observes: “The legislator finds them pre-existing, and adapts or modifies them to answer some national scheme.” Unacquainted as this writer evidently was with the construction of primitive society, he failed to observe that originally, in Greece, all the powers of the legislator himself were derived from and circumscribed by the gens. Indeed, that this organization upon which the superstructure of Grecian society rested was the original source whence proceeded all social privileges and all military rights and obligations, is a condition which until a comparatively recent time has been overlooked. While discussing the relations of the family to the gens, the gens to the phratry, and the phratry to the tribe, Mr. Grote says: “The basis of the whole was the house, hearth, or family—a number of which, greater or less, composed the gens, or genos.”[147] [147] _History of Greece_, vol. iii., p. 54. Mr. Morgan has shown, however, that the family could not have constituted the basis of the gens, for the reason that the heads of families belonged to separate gentes. We are assured that the gens is much older than the monogamic family, and therefore that the latter could not have formed the basis of the gentile organization; but even had the family preceded the gens in order of development, as its members belonged to different gentes it could not have constituted the unit of the social series. In order to gain a clear understanding of the processes and principles involved in the early Grecian form of government, it first becomes necessary briefly to review the various steps in the growth of the governmental functions through two ethnical periods.