through a considerable area, over the face of which communications are difficult and proportionately rare.  Instantly the local group tends to become all in all.  Authority and initiative must always rest with the men on the spot; and the old natal combinations, weakened by inevitable absenteeism, at last cease to represent the true framework of the social order.  They tend to linger on, of course, in the shape of subordinate institutions.  For instance, the totemic groups cease to have direct connection with the marriage system, and, on the strength of the ceremonies associated with them, develop into what are known as secret societies.  Or, again, the clan is gradually overshadowed by the family, so that kinship, with its rights and duties, becomes practically limited to the nearer blood-relations; who, moreover, begin to be treated for practical purposes as kinsmen, even when they are on the side of the family which lineage does not officially recognize.  Thus the forms of natal association no longer constitute the backbone of the body politic.  Their public importance has gone.  Henceforward, the social unit is the local group.  The territorial principle comes more and more to determine affinities and functions.  Kinship has dethroned itself by its very success.  Thanks to the organizing power of kinship, primitive society has grown, and by growing has stretched the birth-tie until it snaps.  Some relationships become distant in a local and territorial sense, and thereupon they cease to count.  My duty towards my kin passes into my duty towards my neighbour.

* * * * *

Reasons of space make it impossible to survey the further developments to which social organization is subject under the sway of locality.  It is, perhaps, less essential to insist on them here, because, whereas totemic society is a thing which we civilized folk have the very greatest difficulty in understanding, we all have direct insight into the meaning of a territorial arrangement; since, from the village community up to the modern state, the same fundamental type of social structure obtains throughout.

Besides local contiguity, however, there is a second principle which greatly helps to shape the social order, as soon as society is sufficiently advanced in its arts and industries to have taken firm root, so to speak, on the earth’s surface.  This is the principle of private property, and especially of private property in land.  The most fundamental of class distinctions is that between rich and poor.  That between free and slave, in communities that have slavery, is not at first sight strictly parallel, since there may be a class of poor freemen intermediate between the nobles and the slaves; but it is obvious that in this case, too, private property is really responsible for the mode of grading.  Or sometimes social position may seem to depend primarily on industrial occupation, the Indian caste-system providing an instance in point.  Since, however, the most honourable occupations in the long run coincide with those that pay best, we come back once again to private property as the ultimate source of social rank, under an economic system of the more developed kind.