INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOLOGY 227
lages. They are responsible individually and collectively for the good conduct of their groups. The fact is that these Japanese towns and villages had a structure which was no longer that of the tribe or the clan. Japan, at the time when the above- mentioned author wrote, was in a situation analogous to that of our states of the Middle Ages, where we find the same kinds of division. Will anyone claim that Japan has imitated Europe of the Middle Ages? The most general conditions of the life of societies being everywhere the same, and the number of social combinations possible in view of adaptation to these conditions being limited, what wonder that the same forms are met with everywhere at the same stages? This is no more extraordinary than the homogeneity of the human species, or than the homo- geneity of the evolution of each individual of this species. It is necessary to bear well in mind this leading sociological concep- tion, that not only are all men of the same species, but that human societies are also all of the same species, in spite of their possible, but always limited and accessory, variations.
E. de Laveleye confirms the preceding observations relative to the simply arithmetical divisions which, at a certain moment, replace the genetic groupings, when he recalls, in La propriete et ses formes primitives, that in former times in Russia
every member of the society must enter a group of ten (decanie), which had as its mission the defense or the guarantee of all in general and of each in particular; that is to say, it was the function of the group of ten to avenge the citizen who belonged to it, and to exact the wehrgeld, if he had been killed; but at the same time it went security for all its members.
If the division into groups of ten took the place of that into com- munities of clans or of tribes, it was evidently because the social frontiers had passed beyond those of the tribes and the clans whose structure was broken down. The inner social divisions are always correlated with the general structure of the society or of the state, and notably with that of its frontiers.
As to the Russian mir, it still exists, as in France before the Revolution of 1789, and it still preserves certain village communi- ties. The mir is in fact the village commune, formed by the descendants of the same family group of nomads who have
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