54 galton.org
54
Inquiries into Human Faculty
beasts, applies with more or less obvious modifications to barbarians in
relation to their neighbours, but I insist on a close resemblance in the
particular circumstance, that many savages are so unamiable and morose
as to have hardly any object in associating together, besides that of mutual
support. If we look at the inhabitants of the very same country as the oxen
I have described, we shall find them congregated into multitudes of tribes,
all more or less at war with one another. We shall find that few of these
tribes are very small, and few very large, and that it is precisely those that
are exceptionally large or small whose condition is the least stable. A very
small tribe is sure to be overthrown, slaughtered, or driven into slavery by
its more powerful neighbour. A very large tribe falls to pieces through its
own unwieldiness, because, by the nature of things, it must be either
deficient in centralisation or straitened in food, or both. A barbarian
population is obliged to live dispersedly, since a square mile of land will
support only a few hunters or shepherds; on the other hand, a barbarian
government cannot be long maintained unless the chief is brought into
frequent contact with his dependants, and this is geographically
impossible when his tribe is so scattered as to cover a great extent of
territory. The law of selection must discourage every race of barbarians
which supplies self-reliant individuals in such large numbers as to cause
tribes of moderate size to lose their blind desire of aggregation. It must
equally discourage a breed that is incompetent to supply such men in
sufficiently abundant ratio to the rest of the population to ensure the
existence of tribes of not too large a size. It must not be supposed that
gregarious instincts are equally important to all forms of savage life; but I
hold, from what we know of the clannish fighting habits of our
forefathers, that they were every whit as applicable to the earlier ancestors
of our European stock as they are still to a large part of the black
population of Africa.
There is, moreover, an extraordinary power of tyranny invested in the
chiefs of tribes and nations of men, that so vastly outweighs the analogous
power possessed by the leaders of animal herds as to rank as a special
attribute of human society, eminently conducive to slavishness. If any
