But while it is natural that the children and the group should grow up about the mother, it is not conceivable that woman should definitely or long control the activities of society, especially on their motor side.  In view of his superior power of making movements and applying force, the male must inevitably assume control of the life direction of the group, no matter what the genesis of the group.  It is not a difficult conclusion that, if woman’s leaping, lifting, running, climbing, and slugging capacity is inferior to man’s, by however slight a margin, her fighting capacity is less in the same degree; for battle is only an application of force, and there has never been a moment in the history of society when the law of might, tempered by sexual affinity, did not prevail.  We must then, in fact, recognize a sharp distinction between the law of descent and the fact of authority.

The male was everywhere present in primitive society, and everywhere made his force felt.  We can see this illustrated most plainly in the animal group, where the male is the leader, by virtue of his strength.  There is also a stage of human society which may be called the prematriarchal stage, from the fact that ideas of kinship are so feeble that no extensive social filiation is effected through this principle, in consequence of which the group has not reached the tribal stage of organization on the basis of kinship, but remains in the primitive biological relation of male, female, and offspring.  The Botocudos, Fuegians, Eskimos, West Australians, Bushmen, and Veddahs represent this primitive stage more or less completely; they have apparently not reached the stage where the fact of kinship expresses itself in maternal organization.  They live in scattered bands, held together loosely by convenience, safety, and inertia, and the male is the leader; but the leadership of the male in this case, as among animals, is very different from the organized and institutional expression of the male force in systems of political control growing out of achievement.  This involves a social history through which these low tribes have not passed.

Organization cannot proceed very far in the absence of social mass, and the collection of social mass took place unconsciously about the female as a universal preliminary of the conscious synthetization of the mass through males.  From the side of organization, the negative accretion of population about female centers and filiation through blood is very precious, since filiation based on relation to females prepares the way for organization based on motor activities.[122] But in the prematernal stage, in the maternal stage, and in the patriarchal stage the male force was present and was the carrier of the social will.  In the fully maternal system, indeed, the male authority is only thinly veiled, or not at all.  Filiation through female descent precedes filiation through achievement, because it is a function of somatic conditions,