"No; now, Bertha, listen. I shall offend you, but I must tell you the truth. If you saw me flinging away my happiness, I know you would try to save me, and I must do the same. Stop" she turned away, but he stretched out his hand and took firm possession of hers "I don't enter into the question at all; but my uncle wishes you to go back to your own home at once, and surely you ought to obey your father, Bertha."

She tried to free her hand, but she made The scorn in her face vexed

no answer.

"Thank you, that will do, I have heard quite enough. I shall go to town to-day; I shall not wait till to-morrow, and I prefer to go alone. I believe I have been here too long"-a remembrance of Mrs. Lucas's words stung her afresh. "Now go to Phoebe, Frank; I am not angry with you, but I may as well tell you that you have done much more harm than good."

She swept out of the room, and Frank stood bewildered; he tried to recall the conversation, especially any part of it which could account for Bertha's vehe

IN examining the evidence of develop ment in Morals and Politics, there continually comes to my mind a childishly simple little story told by a Buddhist sage in argument many ages ago. It is the legend of the three child-princes who debate with one another how rice comes. Little Prince Anurudha settles the matter at once. "Rice!" he says, "why of course it comes out of the great golden bowl!" The child had always seen it served at meal-times from the golden bowl, and naturally concluded that this was its origin. But Prince Bhaddi knew something more than this"It is produced from the kettle," he said; indeed he happened to have been in the kitchen and seen so much. The third, Prince Kimbila, had been even farther back than this in the history of rice; he had seen the servants husking it, and accordingly declared that it came out of the rice-cleaner. Then the princes' tutor joins in, and explains to them how many states and processes the rice had really gone

through, the sowing and fencing and watching and reaping, before it came to be cleaned and cooked, and brought in for their young highnesses' dinner. Now this parable touches the origin of social laws. The philosophers who think that standard rules. of right and wrong were given to or implanted in primæval man, ready-made and perfect, are like the little prince who thought his rice came straight into existence in the golden bowl. But those who look into the matter by the light of ethnology may, like the other princes and their tutor, become acquainted with earlier processes by which the world's ethics and politics have been grown, and cleansed, and prepared.

We can scarcely bring before our minds. in clearer light the relation of primitive and savage society to modern and civilised society, than by tracing the long and changing course of a custom which began as right and ended as wrong, which was once a virtuous act on which the very existence of society depended, and which has come

to be itself a crime. Revenge is a passion well marked among the lower animals, and the study of its development there and in the most rudimentary human life may be left to naturalists. But among the rudest savage tribes, it is already recognized and organized as one of the great social forces. Let us trace the path of the avenger of blood along the course of history, from the savage days when his bloodstained spear was the very safeguard of society, to the civilized days when not only the kinsman's ancient duty is taken from him to be executed otherwise, but he is punished if he presume to maintain it in survival.

Sir George Grey's picture of the law of blood-revenge among the natives of Australia is not only touched in with an artist's hand, but has the merit of showing native custom as yet scarcely affected by European influence. The holiest duty a native is called on to perform, he says, is to avenge the death of his nearest relation. If he left this duty unfulfilled, the old women would taunt him; if he were unmarried no girl would speak to him; if he had wives they would leave him; his mother would cry constantly and lament she had given birth to so degenerate a son; his father would treat him with contempt, and he would become a mark for public scorn. This, by the way, is a typical passage as showing the enormous force with which, in savage society, public opinion is brought to bear on the individual, forcing his moral duty on him. The social sanction thus already gives to custom the force of imperative law. Here, also, there appears the important fact, which is as true elsewhere in the savage world, that though the native women are from our point of view miserably oppressed and ill-used, yet for all that, they have their influence, they are principal agents in enforcing the social consensus by their arts of praising and aggravating, whereby they keep the men up to the mark of social propriety. The next point in the Australian law of blood-vengeance is, that if the individual culprit escapes, his kinsfolk are implicated in his guilt, and the avenger slays the nearest relative he can fall upon, the nearer the better. The consequence is, that when it becomes known that a murder has been committed, and especially when the actual culprit has run for his life, the greatest consternation prevails among the whole family connexion,

for no one can tell where the blow will fall. The very children of seven or eight years old, when they hear that some one has murdered another, know at once whether or no they are jee-dyte or kin to the murderer, and if so, are off to a place of safety. In this interesting account we see plainly recognized the remotely ancient doctrine of family responsibility, of which more presently. But inasmuch as it is everybody's interest that the culprit should be punished, for till then all his relations are in danger, there is generally an amicable settlement in which both families unite, and the avenging parties start on the murderer's track, to atone for blood by blood. That this rude law restrains murder within the community, and thus keeps society together, there is no doubt. But the inevitable tendency between clan and clan to make reprisals, avenging vengeance as murder, is one cause of those incessant tribal wars, which more than anything else have brought about that wretched hunted handto-mouth life which kept the Australians down so near the bottom of the social scale. This disastrous effect was all the stronger from the natives, like various other savages, finding it hard to admit the existence of what we call natural death, but rather setting it down to some malignant sorcerer having slain the man by magic arts. Therefore, when a man falls sick and dies, it simply has to be divined where the sorcerer is to be found who caused his death, and this is learnt by watching the flickering of the funeral fire, or the direction of tracks of an insect or footprints of an imagined demon from the grave. Then the avenger sets out across the bush and the waterless desert, with a relentless fury that sets at nought weariness and hunger and thirst, to track out the unsuspecting wretch on whom the diviner has fixed, and to wreak his misguided vengeance.

Turning to Dr. von Martius's description of the South American forest tribes, we again find the custom of blood-revenge operating as a penal statute. When a murder is done within the clan, vengeance is the private business of the families concerned; but when the murderer is of another clan or tribe, it becomes public business, the injured community hold council, and mostly decide for war, if they dare. The deceased's nearest of kin, the avengers of blood, will work themselves into drunken fury at a solemn debauch,

chanting in wild songs the virtues of their murdered kinsman, and when the fight begins they rush on foremost, known by the black spots painted on their bodies to show their deadly office. Of course disastrous effects spring from such a system, the Indian's long years spent in brooding over a coming vengeance, the dark sly waylaying and stabbing, the gloating over the tortures of the enemy caught at last and bound to a tree and slowly hacked to pieces with knives and arrows, the spread of the feud from family to family, till it solidifies into intertribal enmity and hereditary war.

Such, in its nature and consequences, is the primitive law of blood-revenge, which, if space served, might be exemplified in further detail among the North American Indians, the South Sea Islanders, the rude tribes of Africa and Asia, and then carried on into the history of the barbaric nations, till where it is seen to have been slowly ousted by higher civilization. The ordinary Englishman's earliest and best ideas of it are derived from the Jewish law of the avenger of blood, and we note there one of the plans of distinguishing between unpremeditated and deliberate manslaughter, by the establishment of cities of refuge. The old German law recognized blood-revenge in its full and free savage form, while later provisions show the intermediate stages through which the law of our forefathers passed on its way to our own. Within historical times, when every freeman was still allowed to avenge his wrongs by private war, the murdered man's kindred might and did raise feud against the murderer, and blood-feud raged or smouldered between clan and clan. But also the law had already fixed the were-gild or "manmoney" which was the proper compensation for a life, so much for a freeman, so much for a nobleman, and the family might, if they would, forego their vengeance, and take instead the price of blood. That is to say, the forefathers of the English 1000 or 1200 years ago, had just passed beyond the stage of unmitigated exterminating blood-feud which the wilder Circassian tribes kept up in the present generation; they had arrived at the stage of choice between vengeance in blood or in money which the jurisprudence of the Beduin Árabs maintains in our own day. Going back from these later reforms,

however, we notice the wonderful ethnological generality of the primitive law of blood for blood among mankind. Questions of bodily form and complexion, questions of connexion of language, have no direct bearing on it; it belongs to races of all colors, of all linguistic families, of all ages of chronology, with but this one limitation, which lies at the very root of the matter, that it is a characteristic of the lower organization of society. It was not by theoretical changes in men's ideal of right and wrong, but by the sheer pressure of circumstances in society at a particular stage of development, that the ancient usage was suppressed. When men are packed close in towns, the vengeance-laws which in a wild sparsely-inhabited land are bearable, and even beneficial, for lack of better, become a danger to the very existence of society. It is very interesting to see a tribe settling down into conditions of denser population, and acting on the avowed necessity of thus changing their criminal system. In the United States, the Creeks, always known as among the most progressive of the native tribes, have settled down more perfectly than any to the conditions of civilized life, and of them this account was given some years ago: "Formerly the brother of the deceased avenged the murder; if there was no brother, the nearest relative. Among the Creeks, now, however, the murderer undergoes a regular trial before some of the leading chiefs of the nation, and is dealt with according to their decision." In South Africa, the Basutos, under the pressure of township life, have abandoned the old execution of revenge by the nearest of kin, and now give a certain authority to the chief to protect the manslayer till his cause is tried, and they assign a distinct reason for the change: "If we were to revenge ourselves (they say) the town would soon be dispersed." So among the Beduins, the wilder hordes hold fastest to the law of mutual successive murder in its pristine ferocity, while it is oftener among tribes under the influence of town life that the blood-money is taken, and the feud loosed. In modern Europe, the old usage has vanished, or passed into a state of survival. The ferocious Corsican vendetta raged within the present century. To put it down required a pitched battle between the old savage custom and the new civilized law. It

was only by the most stringent severity in prohibiting the carrying of arms that the change was made; but it was made, and the avenger no longer lurks in wait on lonely mountain paths to claim the debt of blood, nor flees when he has done the deed to barricade himself in his lonely farmhouse and spend his life in holding it as a fort against the murdered murderer's clan. It is perhaps in the semi-barbarous provinces of European Turkey that this element of primitive culture survives with most strength. In our Indian Empire, it has not ceased to be a source of trouble and danger, as was manifested not long since. We forbid the avenger of blood to strike within our frontiers, where bloodenemies from the outside must meet on neutral ground. When Shir Ali the Affghan took on himself to execute the law of his country within British territory, when he smote his hereditary foe in the peachgroves of Peshawur, he was sent as a convict to the Andamans, and there by his fatal knife India lost a wise and beneficent statesman.

Among the barbaric nations who keep up in modern days the primitive law of vengeance, the Abyssinians show in an interesting way one of its special developments. As among the savages of the Brazilian forests one hears of the avenger of blood minutely and scrupulously hewing or stabbing into the murderer the exact wounds by which he had slain his victim; so the Roman lex talionis, the Jewish eye for eye, tooth for tooth, burning for burning, wound for wound, is still law in Abyssinia. Mr. Mansfield Parkyns illustrates the principle by a curious law-case. Two little boys, aged eight and five, wandering in the woods near a village, came to an owleh tree. The elder climbed into the boughs and threw down fruit to the younger, but by mischance he fell down on his little comrade's head, killing him on the spot. The parents of the deceased child, hoping to get money out of the unwitting delinquent's family, insisted on putting him on trial for his life. The case was argued at length, as it might have been at the tribunal of Barataria. The judges decreed that the boy was guilty, and must suffer death, the execution to be done in strict retaliation by the dead boy's brother, who should climb the tree and drop on the little murderer's head till he killed him. On hearing which most righteous judgment, it is

recorded that the mother of the deceased, thinking her vengeance hardly worth risking another son's life for, preferred letting the culprit off.

In connection with the law of vengeance, there arises an instructive question of morality. Lord Kames, a Scotch judge, whose "History of Man" is an important eighteenth century work, brings forward what seem to him conclusive proofs of the overbearing power of malevolent passions in past dark ages of the world. There is no moral principle, he says, more evident than that punishment cannot be inflicted with justice but on the guilty, and yet the opinion was formerly universal that the innocent might be justly involved in the same punishment with the guilty. He refers to numerous cases: thus, when Hanno plotted to poison the Carthaginian senate at a feast, not only was he tortured to death, but all his family were cut off without mercy; in Macedon the punishment of treason was extended to the criminal's relations; Cicero indeed admits the hardship of punishing the child for the parent's crime, but considers the law excellent on the ground of expediency, as binding the parent to the republic by his love for his children; the retaliation of murder against the criminal's whole clan, the so-called deadly feud,' prevailed within historical times in England, and King Edmund made a law to limit it. Now Lord Kames may well give honor to the Israelite law for upholding a principle far in advance of this, "The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers: every man shall be put to death for his own sin." In Lord Kames's time, however, the remark was not obvious as it is now, that this maxim appears not in Exodus but in Deuteronomy, that is to say, not in the earlier Code, but in the much later Revised Code. That the Jewish mind could without protest accept the doctrine of family retribution, which the new maxim so expressly abrogates, is well shown in the narratives of the execution of the children of Achan, Saul, and Haman for their fathers' misdeeds. If we look among the Beduin Arabs as the near modern relatives of the ancient Israelites in race, language, and culture, we find them still keeping up the right of vengeance to the third and fourth generation against the manslayer's family, and even taking several innocent lives for

one.

There is, of course, a distinction between slaying members of the criminal's family instead of himself, and slaying criminal and family together. Yet the same principle is so far involved, that a man may be punished for his father's crime, and in practice there are intermediate cases such as this of the Beduins, where several kinsmen may be put to death for the crime of one. It is not for nothing, all legists must allow, that the Jewish law holds so high a place in the jurisprudence of the world. Israelite law proclaimed, ages before it came to be Roman law, that the penalty of the crime shall fall on the criminal alone. It curiously illustrates the change in the English standard of right and wrong which has come since King Edmund's time, that this intelligent judge, Lord Kames, has no idea but that his principle of individual responsibility is a precept of fundamental morality. One wonders that the facts he brought together from Greece and Carthage, from England and Japan, did not put into his mind that these nations acted on a principle of jurisprudence quite different from his own, namely, the principle of family responsibility. But his judicial life had seemingly confirmed him in the notion that his own legal education qualified him to sit in judgment on mankind, and teach them the abstract necessary principles of right and wrong. He is satisfied to account for the practice of punishing innocent relatives with the guilty, by talking of the power of revenge to trample on conscience and law. Let us compare this crude decision with that of a lawyer of this century, whose mind has been turned to investigating law from the point of view of development. Sir Henry Maine simply points to the fundamental difference between the ancient and modern ideas of society. We look on society as an aggregation of individuals, but to the earlier view the unit was not the individual but the family. While the crime is looked upon as a corporate act, and the criminal's children and kinsfolk are involved with him in its consequences, the primitive mind is not perplexed with the questions which become troublesome as soon as the individual is conceived as altogether separate from the group. It is true that Sir Henry Maine does not go for evidence down to the lowest or savage stages of society, but his antiquarian research carries him quite far enough back

to reach the required principle of family responsibility. Still farther back in civilization this principle is found in full vigor. We have noticed how among the Australians, when a murder has been committed, all the criminal's family, in Sir George Grey's words, "consider themselves to be quite as guilty as he is," and run for their lives. In the practice of the South Sea Islanders, vengeance might fall not on the murderer but on some relative, perhaps an innocent child, for the whole family or tribe was responsible, and we hear of such cases as blood-revenge handed down as an heir-loom for generations, the father on his deathbed whispering to his son the name of the man doomed to expiate the crime of his grandfather. In Kafir law, where punishment is mostly inflicted by fines, this doctrine of family liability is well marked, the father paying for his son's offence, and the family being responsible for any member who cannot pay. When a man obstinately refuses to obey the chief's orders, the whole kraal or clan is held responsible, and the chief inflicts the customary punishment known as "eatingup;" an armed party stealthily attacks the kraal, plundering the cattle, and firing on* or spearing any who resist. Col. Maclean, in his "Compendium of Kafir Laws and Customs," thus quotes Mr. Warner, an official resident in Zulu-land: "The grand principle of Kafir law is collective responsibility, and on this principle depends in a very great degree the peace and safety of society. Do away with this, while the Kafirs still continue in their present clannish and barbarous state, and they would immediately become unmanageable."

Such evidence clearly shows that it is not immorality, but rude morality, which accounts for ancient laws punishing the innocent kinsmen for or even with the actual transgressor. A family is held to be an organic body which may be punished in any of its members. As a matter of practical expediency, any statesman set to rule a half-civilized people would admit the immense force of the theory of family responsibility, as a means of orderly government, acting just where our theory of individual responsibility breaks down. The mutual influence of the members of families is one of the strongest of social forces, and to hold the family responsible is to give the ruler control over this force, to be used on his side instead of against him.