At length we reach our more immediate subject—­namely, social organization.  In what sense, if any, is social organization dependent on numbers?  Unfortunately, it is too large a question to thrash out here.  I may, however, refer the reader to the ingenious classification of the peoples of the world, by reference to the degree of their social organization and culture, which is attempted by Mr. Sutherland in his Origin and Growth of the Moral Instinct.  He there tries to show that a certain size of population can be correlated with each grade in the scale of human evolution—­at any rate up to the point at which full-blown civilization is reached, when cases like that of Athens under Pericles, or Florence under the Medici, would probably cause him some trouble.  For instance, he makes out that the lowest savages, Veddas, Pygmies, and so on, form groups of from ten to forty; whereas those who are but one degree less backward, such as the Australian natives, average from fifty to two hundred; whilst most of the North American tribes, who represent the next stage of general advance, run from a hundred up to five hundred.  At this point he takes leave of the peoples he would class as “savage,” their leading characteristic from the economic point of view being that they lead the more or less wandering life of hunters or of mere “gatherers.”  He then goes on to arrange similarly, in an ascending series of three divisions, the peoples that he terms “barbarian.”  Economically they are either sedentary, with a more or less developed agriculture, or, if nomad, pursue the pastoral mode of life.  His lowest type of group, which includes the Iroquois, Maoris, and so forth, ranges from one thousand to five thousand; next come loosely organized states, such as Dahomey or Ashanti, where the numbers may reach one hundred thousand; whilst he makes barbarism culminate in more firmly compacted communities, such as are to be found, for example, in Abyssinia or Madagascar, the population of which he places at about half a million.

Now I am very sceptical about Mr. Sutherland’s statistics, and regard his bold attempt to assign the world’s peoples each to their own rung on the ladder of universal culture as, in the present state of our knowledge, no more than a clever hypothesis; which some keen anthropologist of the future might find it well worth his while to put thoroughly to the test.  At a guess, however, I am disposed to accept his general principle that, on the whole and in the long run, during the earlier stages of human evolution, the complexity and coherence of the social order follow upon the size of the group; which, since its size, in turn, follows upon the mode of the economic life, may be described as the food-group.