Even the more democratic expression resign suggests at once an office of public or quasi public character.

To talk of abdicating one's private relationships sounds absurd; one might as well talk of electing his parents, it would seem to us.

Such misunderstanding of far-eastern social possibilities comes from our having indulged in digressions from our more simple nomadic habits.
If in imagination we will return to our ancestral muttons and the then existing order of things, the idea will not strike us as so strange; for in those early bucolic days every father was a king.

Family economics were the only political questions in existence then.

The clan was the unit.