INTRODUCTION.
I propose to describe the rise and the progress of the principal institutions that are common to the nations of the Aryan race. I shall endeavour to illustrate the social organization under which our remote forefathers lived. I shall, so far as I am able, trace the modes of thought and of feeling which, in their mutual relations, influenced their conduct. I shall indicate the genus of those institutions which have now attained so high a development; and I shall attempt to show the circumstances in which political society took its rise, and the steps by which, in Western Europe, it supplanted its ancient rival.
My subject is confined to the institutions of the Aryan race. I do not offer these pages as a contribution to the history of culture. I do not seek to propose or to support any system as to the origin or the evolution of man. With the theories that have been advocated on these subjects, I am not now concerned, and I express no opinion upon them. I neither affirm nor deny their truth. I seek to investigate the early history of the institutions of one family of the human race, and to follow that inquiry so far only as there is positive evidence for our guidance. Even within these limits the subject is wide enough and grand enough to warrant a separate discussion. That family of nations of which I write is confessedly the foremost in the world. It includes almost all the nations of Europe. It includes
