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Updated: May 1, 2025
The retrogression was but partial and temporary, however; the exposed frontier has been steadily pushed eastward into the heart of Asia; the industrial type of society is no longer menaced by the predatory type; the primeval clan-system has entirely disappeared as a social force; and warfare, once ubiquitous and chronic, has become local and occasional.
His military stations would have been too easily destroyed by the bravery of the Irish, strengthened by the elasticity of their clan-system, if they were, planted on land. He, therefore, set them in the interior lakes which are so numerous in the island, where his navy could repel all the attacks of the natives, unused as they were to naval conflicts.
Guarantees for mutual security were exchanged, and it was agreed that each should be free to worship in his own fashion. The treaty throws light upon the clan-system still obtaining in seventh-century Arabia. The Jews were their own masters in the ordering of their lives, as were the Medinan tribes, even after many years of neighbourhood and frequent interchange of commerce and mutual assurances.
An entirely new light, however, has been thrown on the meaning of this clan-system by the recent researches of Dr. and Mrs. Seligmann. It now turns out that some of the Veddas are exogamous that is to say, are obliged by custom to marry outside their own clan though others are not. The question then arises, Which, for the Veddas, is the older system, marrying-out or marrying-in?
The clan-system, unfortunately, favored deadly feuds, which often drenched all parts of the island in blood. Family quarrels, being in themselves unnatural, led to the most atrocious crimes. The old Greek drama furnishes frightful examples of it, and similar passions sometimes filled the breasts of those leaders of Irish clans. Few of them died in their beds.
Thus, all marriages between near relations being impossible, the chances to marry at all are considerably diminished, so that nowadays, with the decreased population, a man very often cannot find a wife, even though surrounded by any number of girls. I do not mean to imply by this that the whole clan-system was organized simply to prevent inbreeding.
Throughout the best part of Europe, its conquests succeeded in transforming the ancient predatory type of society into the modern industrial type. It effectually broke up the primeval clan-system, with its narrow ethical ideas, and arrived at the broad conception of rights and duties coextensive with Humanity. But in the method upon which Rome proceeded there was an essential element of weakness.
Everybody was fed; and there was no need, in ordinary times at least, for any one to go hungry. It was only with the breaking-up of the clan-system in Japan that the possibilities of starvation for the worker first came into existence.
And, our chief object in speaking of the stand made by the Irish against the pagan Danes is, to show how the clan-system became in truth the avenger of God's altars and the preserver of the sacred edifices and numerous temples with which, as we have seen, the Island of Saints was so profusely studded, from total annihilation.
At Rome during the Republic there was no question of social inequality between the sexes, for though in law the patriarchal clan-system, imposed by the exigencies of a migrating group, made the father of the family responsible for civil order, no inferences were drawn to the detriment of the mother's position in the household.
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