XXV; 1885-6, Index at Women; also Bemis, Local Govt. in Michigan and the Northwest, 24-5. In 1870 a public school system was established in England. The parish, which had gradually been robbed of nearly all of its original civil powers, gained a partial compensation in being made the school district with the right to elect its own officers. But while the mother country was thus two centuries and a half behind her American colonies in making the support of education an essential feature of local government, in one respect she has far outstripped us. Not only are female rate payers possessed of the full school franchise; but they have the same suffrage as men in borough, vestry, and poor law union elections: See a good article in Westminster Review, July, 1888, on Local Government: The Franchise Question. CHAPTER V. EVOLUTION AND DECAY OF THE HUNDRED ORGANISM. · I. THE BROTHERHOOD OR WARD. (a).-The Phratria. For many ages the hundred or its analogue occupied a place of some importance in the social organism; but in every phase it seems to have been more limited in functions and less natural in structure than either the higher or lower orders. Besides its early history is obscure and perplexing in the extreme. On this account any attempt to identify the prototype of the hundred, during the genealogical organization of Aryan society, must prove somewhat unsatisfactory. Still such fragmentary evidence as we do possess seems to establish a very strong probability that the Spartan oba,' the Ionic phratria, and the Italic curia, occupying as they do the second place in the evolution of social groups, must be On the oba see Müller, Hist. of the Doric Races, II, 79 ff; Schömann, Antiquities, 211, 223; Grote, History of Greece, II, 361-2; Gilbert, Handb. der griech. Staatsalterthümer, I, 9, 44; Smith, Dict. of Greek and Roman Ant., 1153. Phratries existed in Elis, Chios, Andros, Tenos, Ilion, Aigai in Mysia, Panormos, Messana, and elsewhere. Suggéneia has the same signification as phratria, and appears as a division of the people in Kalymna, Mylasa, Olymos, and Labranda: Gilbert, Handb. der griech. Staatsalt, II, 303. Cf. Müller, Handb. der klass. Alt., IV, 20; Pauly, Real-Encyclopädie, V, 1566. organically the same institution as that to which, for some special reason, the Germans gave a numerical designation.' The Ionic phratria may be regarded as an expanded form of the genos, held together, like the latter, by the double bond of kinship and common worship; but the phratric union was probably less intimate and more frequently artificial than that of the families constituting a gens. Such seems to be the general import of the celebrated fragment of Dikaearchos which represents the phratry as a union of different gentes formed through the practice of exogamy in marriage.3 But if, originally, the phratries were pure genealogical groups, we may well believe, with Schömann, that at the first dawn of history they had already become localized; for settlement in 1 Cf. Freeman, Comp. Politics, 117; Fiske, American Political Ideas, 61. 2 Grote, Hist. of Greece, III, 55. Cf. Gilbert, Handb. der griech. Staatsalt., I, 110, who appears to hold that the entire Ionic system, except the genos, was more fictitious than is usually supposed. The fragment of Dikaearchos, a pupil of Aristotle, is preserved by Stephen of Byzantium, writing about 400 A. D. The original will be found in Wachsmuth, Historical Antiquities, I, Appendix, VII. Cf. also Gilbert, Handbuch, II, 302-3. The following is the substance of it as translated by Morgan, Ancient Society, 236: "The Patry (Patra is used for genos) comes into being when relationship, originally solitary, passes over into the second stage [the relationship of parents with children and children with parents] and derives its eponym from the oldest and chief member of the patry, as Aicidas, Pelopidas." "But it came to be called phatria and phratria when certain ones gave their daughters to be married into another patry. For the woman who was given in marriage participated no longer in her paternal sacred rites, but was enrolled in the patry of her husband; so that for the union, formerly subsisting by affection between sisters and brothers, there was established another union based on community of religious rites, which they denominated a phratry; and so that again, while the patry took its rise in the way we have previously mentioned, from the blood relation between parents and children and children and parents, the phratry took its rise from the relationship between brothers." This, of course, must be regarded, so far as the origin through exogamy is concerned, as merely the opinion of Dikaearchos. See Morgan, p. 237; Schrader, Sprachvergleichung und Urgeschichte, 383. *Schömann, Athenian Constitutional History, 10-12. |