CHAPTER XI. TRIBAL LIFE OF THE EPIC PERIOD
Specially Contributed to the Present Work
By Dr. JULIUS WELLHAUSEN[41]
Professor in the University at Göttingen
People who are unlearned in the law, are apt to assume that it executes itself; or at least they think it absolutely necessary that law and the execution of law should go hand in hand. But in the primitive stages of human society it was not so. The law existed long before there was any magistracy to carry it into effect, and even after magisterial authority had been established, it frequently left, not only the pursuit, but the execution of law to the parties concerned. An instructive picture of such a state of things is found in the copious literature that has been preserved with regard to the Epic Period of the ancient Arabs, i.e., the period immediately preceding their amazing irruption into the world’s history through the gate of Islam.
The desert has imprinted its stamp upon the Arabs. They are particularly interesting for this very reason, that by the desert they have, so to speak, been arrested at what is in many respects a very primitive stage of development. Yet we must not imagine them roving about it like wild animals, gathering together for temporary ends and dispersing just as they please. As a matter of fact, they have no settled abodes, they are not tied to the soil nor linked with one another by a fixed domicile, and consequently they are not organised on the basis of locality, according to districts, towns, and villages. But they have instead an inner principle of association and organisation, of union and distinction, inherent in the very elements of race. It is the principle of consanguinity, of kinship. For the Arab, his political genus, his differentia specifica, are innate as indelible characteristics. He knows the clan to which he belongs, and the stock to which his clan belongs; the tribe or nation of which the stock is a part, and the larger group that includes the tribe or nation. Associations are regarded by them as natural units, founded on consanguinity, and they stand in a close and natural relationship, one to another, corresponding to nearer or remoter degrees of consanguinity (by the father’s side) so that their statistics assume the form of a genealogy.
Among the ancient Hebrews this form survived even after they had settled in towns and villages; Isaac was the father of the nations of Israel and Edom, Israel the father of twelve tribes, Judah the father of five lineages, and each lineage in its turn father or grandfather of clans and families. Such a principle of organisation is equally serviceable for settlement or migration, for war or peace; and being independent of all conditions of fixed localities, it makes the tribe as mobile as an army. For an army, too, must possess an organisation adaptable to every place, and as suitable to a hostile country as to its own. But an army is broken up into artificial divisions; the men may be put into one branch or another at will, and the place of the individual in the whole scheme is notified by artificial marks of distinction. With the Arabs, on the other hand, the form is indistinguishable from the substance, they are born into their cadres, and their uniform is, as it were, innate to them. The closer or remoter circles of kindred, from the clan to the nation, are their companies, battalions, and regiments, which include not only the fighting men, but their wives and children also, though the latter take no direct part in any fight.
The two most important stages of the political affinity are the highest and the lowest, the two poles, as it were, of the system; the intermediate stages are less important, because they assume the qualities of one pole or the other, according to circumstances. The highest association, which we call the tribe, includes all the families which migrate together regularly, i.e., which make the circuit of certain hunting-grounds, often great distances apart, according to the season of the year. One tribe will not contain more than a few thousand souls; if it exceeds that number, it becomes too large for common migration and pasturage and is obliged to divide. The lowest is the clan, which consists of families within the nearest degrees of kinship, which invariably pitch their tents close together in a common quarter (dâr).
Beyond the tribe the bond of consanguinity does not break off abruptly; it embraces also the group of such tribes which stand in any sort of historic relation to one another. But in this wider circle the ties of kinship cease to be really effective.
The Arabs as a whole, though linked together by community of speech, of intellectual acquirements and social forms, are not really a nation; neither can the larger groups into which they have split up be called nations; the nation is the tribe. The tribe is the source and the limit of political obligation; what lies outside the tribe is alien. This does not mean that a perpetual and open bellum omnium contra omnes prevails in Arabia; the relations of the tribes among themselves vary greatly, and may be friendly as a result of kinship and treaty. But inasmuch as the idea of common duty of man to man does not exist among them, and no moral law is valid beyond the tribe, everybody alien from the tribe is an enemy as a matter of course. If he is caught in the hunting-grounds of the tribe without a special security, he is an outlaw and fair game. “When I and my people were tormented with hunger,” says an old Bedouin, “God sent me a man who was travelling alone with his wife and his herd of camels; I slew him and took his wife and camels for my own.” He considers the murder perfectly lawful, and is only surprised that a stranger should presume to rove about the country with his wife and his cattle and without a strong escort.
Yet the narrow bounds of the tribal community are capable of enlargement. There are means whereby even the alien can attain the security of a member of the tribe. If he seizes the hem of his enemy’s garment from behind, or ties a knot in the end of his turban, or knots his rope with his own, he has nothing further to fear. If he succeeds in creeping into the other’s tent, or in being introduced and entertained there by the wife or child, his life is sacred. The sanctity of the hearth is unknown among the Arabs, even their altar is not a hearth and is without any fire; but, on the other hand, the tent and those within it are sacred, and even to touch the tent-cords from outside renders a stranger safe from attack. By a sacramental act, accompanied with a simple form of words, he disarms his enemy and assures his own safety. Of course protection is not always stolen, as it were, in this fashion, it may be extended voluntarily; for example, there are cases when the man who grants protection flings his mantle over the one who implores it, thus making him out as his own property which no man may injure.
If a foreign trader desires to travel through the tribe without peril, one of its members must give him a safe-conduct; very often he merely gives him some recognisable piece of his own property to take with him as a passport or charter of legitimation. The relations which arise in this manner are, for the most part, transitory.[42]
But there are also permanent and hereditary relations of this sort, based in part upon contract and oath. A member of a tribe may allow a stranger to sojourn permanently with his clan, and by adoption into the clan the sojourner is considered naturalised by the whole tribe. Not individuals only, but whole clans and families can thus be naturalised, and instances thereof are not uncommon. A fresh element is consequently grafted on the pure tribal stock in these sojourners or protégés. In a few generations they may amalgamate with the tribal stock, but as fresh batches are constantly coming in from without, the distinction between the two elements within the tribe remains.
Consanguinity and contiguity combine to weld the tribe together; external bonds there are none. Blood-relationship is the higher and stronger principle, and neighbourhood passes into brotherhood. All political and military duties are looked upon as obligations of blood or brotherhood. The relations of the individual to larger associations and the community as a whole are precisely the same in character, though less intimate in degree, as those which bind him to his own family. There is no res publica in contradistinction to domestic concerns, no difference, in fact, between what is public and what is private. In principle, at least, all men have the same rights and duties, and no man has one-sided rights or duties. Everything is based on reciprocity, on loyalty and fellowship, and the complementary notions of duty and right, of ruler and subject, of patron and client, are expressed by one and the same word. There are neither officers nor officials, neither jailers nor executioners. There is no magisterial authority, no sovereign power, separable from the association and the individual, with a revenue of its own drawn from taxation and an independent administration by official organisation. The functions of the community are exercised by all its members equally. The prerogative and obligations of the state as we understand it, which can only be fitly discharged by its civil officers, are to the Arab things that the individual is bound to do, not under compulsion from without, but from the corporate feeling of neighbourhood and brotherhood. By his own active exertions the individual has constantly to create afresh those things which with us are permanent organisations and institutions, which lead or seem to lead an independent life of their own. The Arabs stop at the foundations, building no upper story upon them which could be handed over ready-made to their heirs and in which they might live at their ease.
In other words, among the Arabs political relations are moral, for morality is confined within the limits of the tribe. Political organisation is represented by the corporate feeling which finds expression in the exercise of the duties of brotherhood. These require a man to say “good day” to his fellows, or “God bless you,” if anyone sneezes, not to shut himself up from others, nor to take offence easily, to visit the sick, to pay the last honours to the dead, to feed the poor in time of dearth, to protect and care for the widow and the orphan; likewise to slaughter a camel now and again in winter, to arrange sports and there regale the rest with its flesh, for no man slaughters for himself alone, and every such occasion is a feast for the whole company. Such are the common demonstrations of brotherly kindness by which corporate spirit is kept alive under ordinary circumstances. But the greatest duty in which all others culminate is to help a brother in need. Political duty therefore occupies an essentially subordinate place. The great thing in all cases is that the individual should act and should see himself how to get along, but, of course, he is quite at liberty to concert measures with his comrades. The rest are only bound to assist him in time of need, and then they must answer to his call without asking whether he is right or wrong; as he has brewed, so they must drink. The whole tribe does not always rise at once, the primary obligation rests with the clan. The clan has the right of inheritance together with the next duty of paying the debts of any member of it, delivering him from captivity, acting as his compurgators, and assisting him in procuring vengeance or paying mulcts. The larger associations only become involved when the need is great, and more particularly in cases of enmity with another tribe.
It will readily be imagined that a community based so exclusively on mutual fellowship does not fulfil its tasks very satisfactorily, and that the system is not particularly workable. There are many indolent or refractory members who do not fulfil their duties towards the community for lack of coercion from without, and because the only pressure that can be brought to bear upon them, the shame of falling short in the eyes of their kinsfolk or in public opinion, is of no avail against their cowardice or perverse obstinacy. Moreover, individual liberty of action is too little restricted by a due regard for the interests of the community. There is nothing to prevent a man from undertaking on his own account a raid which may kindle a flame of war that will wrap his whole tribe in its conflagration and even spread beyond. Or by the admittance of a stranger into his tent and his clan, which he regards as an obligation of honour and of religion, he may involve his tribe in great difficulties by imposing on them the burden of henceforth protecting the said stranger against his pursuers who may be seeking to arrest him for some crime.
But a more fruitful source of discord than individual cases of friction is the competition between the tribe and the clan. There is no doubt that these polar associations did not spring from the same root, but differ in their very origin; the tribe probably coalesced under the rule of a communistic matriarchal system (endogamous), while the clan is based on an aristocratic patriarchal system (exogamous). At the present time the tribe is regarded as merely an expansion of the clan, both being held together by the same paternal consanguinity. But the degrees of political kinship vary, the ties of blood have not the same force throughout; they act far more effectively in the smaller circle than in the larger. The individual stands in no direct relation to the tribe; his connection with it is through the intermediate links of the clan and the family; his membership in the community is conditioned by his membership of the subordinate groups. As a rule, therefore, the individual finds that his skin is nearer to him than his shirt whenever the interests of tribe and clan diverge. And it goes without saying that this is very often the case.
The defects of the system are to some extent compensated by certain rudiments of government to be found among the Arabs. There is a leading aristocracy; the clans have their chief, and a head chief, the said, is at the head of every tribe. The position of all these chiefs depends upon voluntary recognition of the fact that they are fitted to hold it by their personal qualities and their fortune. They are spontaneously appointed by the common voice, without election or any similar process, and though there is an inclination to make the authority hereditary and the sons reap the advantage of gratitude felt toward their fathers, yet each man must, by his own ability, anew make good his claim to the honours he has inherited if he is to remain in power and public esteem. The word of these chieftains carries most weight in the assemblies in which they meet every evening to talk, dispute, and deliberate. The said gives the casting vote. He decides, for instance, when the tribe shall start on its migrations and when it shall encamp. Generally speaking, however, the chiefs and the said have no advantage over the rest in privilege, but only in obligation. Among the Arabs noblesse oblige is no empty phrase, but a substantial truth. The nobles must distinguish themselves above the rest in the duties incumbent upon all; they must take on their shoulders the burden which others pass by, and out of their own abundance make good the deficit caused by lack of corporate feeling in the multitude. They must be liberal in all things; must not spare their blood in feud nor their goods in peace; they must entertain the stranger, maintain the widow and the orphan, feed the hungry and help the debtor to pay. The principal share in bearing the common burden falls to the said. In return he receives the fourth part of all booty, but he nevertheless often spends his whole fortune for the common stock; his position brings him honour and reputation, but never gain, and therefore does not procure him the envy of baser natures. But his most important duty is to maintain the unity of the tribe and to check the disintegration to which it is liable from individual selfishness and the particularism of the various clans. He is there to step into the breach, as the biblical phrase has it. He is the born mediator and peacemaker.
For all that, he can only negotiate and apply moral pressure. He is but the first among equals; he has great authority but no supreme power, and in the last resort that is not enough either for the external or internal affairs of the community. In war there is no thought of compulsory service, no idea of discipline, of absolute command and obedience. If one clan will not go out with the rest, it separates from them and hardens its heart against their mockery and contempt. If the men will not follow their leader, he sometimes has recourse to an attempt to put them to shame by setting up his sword and threatening to fall upon it, unless he is obeyed. Danger from without is, however, the readiest means of inducing them to submit to a single will, whereas the lack of a central sovereign authority is much more sorely felt in internal affairs.
The only function of the ancient community, apart from self-defence, is the maintenance of peace within its own borders, and the means to this end is the law. The Old Testament, for instance, knows nothing of administration as a function of the state; to rule is to judge, and the generic term for ruler is judge.
The Arabs are not without law, though with them its limits are wider and less strictly defined than with us and include the decision of questions which do not lead to impeachments and law-suits, but refer to duties, not rights.
They also have judges who administer justice. Disputes between fellow tribesmen are brought under discussion in the daily palaver and are there settled without any legal formalities. But international disputes, i.e., matters disputed between members of different tribes, may also be settled by law, if both parties agree to choose an arbitrator to whom they will refer the decision. Anyone may undertake this office; in difficult cases a seer or priest is frequently applied to, or some other man who enjoys general confidence and has a reputation for exceptional wisdom. The arbitrator sometimes makes the parties swear to accept his verdict, whatever it may be, but his business is merely to discover and interpret the law, and he has no power to enforce it. The disputants consequently apply to the judge merely to learn the rules of the law, not to sue for and obtain their rights. His judgment has no legal force and does not entail the execution of the sentence, with which, in fact, it has nothing to do.
An instance of what appears to us so singular a state of things, may make the matter clearer. Shortly before Mohammed’s arrival at Medina, a man of that city went to law with a Bedouin from the neighbourhood before a wise woman about a sum of money, i.e., camels. The woman decided in favour of the man of Medina; he was a well-known person, Suwaid, the son of Samit, by name. When they came to the parting of the ways, Suwaid said to the Bedouin, “Who will be surety that thou wilt pay me the camels?” The other promised to send them as soon as he reached home. But Suwaid, not satisfied with this, wrestled with his debtor, threw him, and bound him. He then carried him off to Medina and kept him in custody, until his kinsmen redeemed him by paying him what he owed.
Criminal jurisdiction, as we understand it, is rendered impossible by the absence of a supreme authority, a magisterial tribunal. Although fidelity to one’s kindred is a moral law and the violation of it a sin, yet the Arabs have not reached the abstract conception of crime against the community at large, still less of punishment inflicted by the community—since for the community to cast off a troublesome or unworthy member is not, strictly speaking, a punishment. They only recognise private offences, and the punishment of these is the business of the individual. There is no official process of investigation with the coercive methods of vigorous cross-examination. If anything is stolen, the owner proclaims his loss aloud and lays the thief under a curse unless he restores the missing article, and all his accomplices likewise, unless they tell what they know of it. If murder or manslaughter has been committed by an unknown hand and this or that man is suspected of being the perpetrator, his clan takes an oath of purgation for him, which may, however, be counterbalanced by an oath to the opposite effect on the part of the dead man’s clan.
The punishment of an offence is of course left to the sufferer. It is his business to see how he can best get compensation for the wrong done him and to seek for help wherever he may find it. He is not forbidden to take vengeance into his own hands, nor is there any compulsion to make him have recourse to law instead of so doing. The individual may, of his own free will, refrain from violent measures, if he pleases, and may enter into negotiations, which are then conducted on the basis of a legal principle, of an inner material law. But if, instead of avenging himself, he resorts to legal proceedings, the question is never one of the punishment of a crime,—which, indeed, could hardly be settled by agreement between the contending parties,—but merely of compensation for a loss. Compensation can be given for everything for which vengeance might be exacted. All crimes are treated in the same manner by the law, and assessed as economic damage. Every loss of honour, property, or life can be appraised by agreement; they all have their price in camels. Vengeance is not thereby appeased, but if revenge is relinquished, the law demands no more.
The worst and most serious crime is bloodshed. Malice or accident, war or peace, make no difference to this. Its natural and primary consequence is blood-revenge. This is, in the first place, the duty of the next heir, but it quickly extends to others, for the clan of the slayer does not desert him, but takes his part, and consequently also the slain man’s whole clan naturally helps the avenger against them. The result is a state of war between the two clans, which finds expression in occasional murders, often at long intervals. All members of the clan are considered accomplices; they espouse one another’s quarrel as in war, and fall victims to vengeance without distinction of persons. Every new member is a fresh motive for vengeance, and thus revenge incessantly breeds revenge. Thus blood-revenge necessarily results in blood-feud between the clans. It has been supposed that blood-feuds are only carried on between two hostile tribes, and not between kindred clans belonging to the same tribe, as that would constitute a breach of tribal unity. But the preservation of tribal unity is a moral axiom only, and incapable of keeping the centrifugal forces under effective control. The clan’s right of feud is undisputed, and, as a matter of fact, blood-feuds are carried on also within the tribe as well as without. The duty of vengeance is more vividly realised than duty to the tribe; it is a sacred primary law which takes precedence of all political considerations. Even if brother slays brother in the same clan, the result is a blood-feud, though the cases on record are as a rule supposititious, not real, just as similar cases are treated by the Greeks as tragic problems in the Oresteia and the Œdipodeia.
Law can be substituted for revenge in murder as in other crimes, that is to say, even blood-guiltiness can be paid off in money, i.e., in camels. This is done by agreement between debtor and creditor or between the clans of both; and when the agreement is brought about, the source of the blood-feud is estopped. In quarrels within the tribe it is the duty of the chiefs, and of the head chief more particularly, to induce the disputants to consent to an accommodation by law. They then negotiate as between two belligerent powers; they can only mediate for peace, not impose it. Sometimes they are successful, sometimes not. Mecca and Medina furnish the best instances of both results. Very often the disputants do not make peace until their strength is utterly exhausted. Then the balance-sheet is drawn up, the debit and credit in dead and wounded compared, and the difference made up in camels.
But it is obvious that in this case the incongruity between what vengeance demands and what the law accords is too glaring. The Arabs are keenly alive to this fact, and it is not considered honourable to accept camels as satisfaction for a murder—to sell blood for milk, as their phrase goes. Vengeance is far better appeased by positive amends on a less unequal scale, by blood for blood, an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. This is sometimes made by peaceful means, and that is what is called talio. The criminal is not sheltered by his own people, but is handed over to the avenger that he may requite him for what he has done. If the heritage of vengeance has passed to a child, the execution is often deferred till his majority.
By this means the quarrel is confined to the parties immediately concerned, the clans are not implicated, blood-revenge does not degenerate into blood-feud, nor does it exceed in the heat of passion the measure of strict retribution. As a matter of fact talio appears to have been common in cases of mere bodily injury. An amusing instance is recorded in the life of Mohammed. At the battle of Bedr he ranged his men in a long straight row, forming them into line with the shaft of a spear. In so doing he struck somewhat heavily upon the body of a man whose figure projected beyond the straight line, and the individual, whose name and race are exactly recorded, complained of his violence. Mohammed promptly offered his own body and said, “Take unto thyself the talio,” which, however, the other magnanimously declined to do. From this we see that also a military commander in the exercise of his official functions differs in nothing from a private person in the eyes of the law. Imagine a scene of this sort between officer and private on a modern parade-ground!
If, however, it is not a question of satisfaction for mere corporeal injuries, but of blood for blood, the situation becomes far more difficult; for if mulct is unwillingly taken, talio is far more unwillingly given. It is the direst disgrace for any clan to give up one of its members, no matter what his crime, into the hands of another clan which intends to put him to death; rather will they slay him themselves. Hence the talio, though an efficacious means of keeping blood-revenge within bounds and blunting its dangerous edges as far as the peace and unity of the tribe are concerned, cannot be practically enforced in the ancient Arabic community, because it has no sovereign power over the tribe.
The first Arabic community with sovereign powers was established by Mohammed in the city of Medina, not upon the basis of blood, which naturally tends to diversity, but upon that of religion, which is equally binding on all. There for the first time the talio becomes effective, there it can be enforced. The community, at the head of which God stands, and the prophet as God’s representative, has power to deliver the shedder of blood over to the avenger, and it is the duty of the community to see that this is done. “In the talio ye have the life,” says the Koran; and a commentary is provided by the hideous anarchy, conjured up by blood-feuds, which prevailed in Medina before the coming of Mohammed—life was then indeed impossible. And in another place the Koran says, “If a man have slain one person unlawfully, it is as if he had slain all men.” In other words the murder of an individual is to be regarded as a crime committed against the whole community, and the whole body must see to it that lawful vengeance may have its course. The execution of vengeance is, however, still left to the rightful avenger; and he is at liberty to exercise his right or renounce it, either freely or for a price. The talio is not yet a punishment, it is only the transition stage to it from revenge.
Originally even Islam knew nothing of the capital punishment publicly inflicted, of a ritual execution by the community and its officers, at least not in cases of murder or manslaughter. Even in the earlier caliphate there were enormous difficulties in the way of the execution of a Moslem who had not shed innocent blood. Apart from the talio the official infliction of capital punishment was hardly possible, for as long as Arab sentiment survived, the people could not grasp the distinction between an executioner and a murderer. A change did not take place until with the accession of the Abbasids the Iranians took the reins of government from the Arabs and brought with them Iranian conceptions of state and law.
On the other hand, the Hebrews, near kinsmen of the Arabs, arrived at just conceptions of capital crime and capital punishment fifteen hundred years earlier than they. According to the Hebrew view, the guilt of sin, which is held to be an offence against the Deity, weighs upon the whole community, until the actual perpetrator of the crime is extirpated or purged out of its midst. The sentence of death is carried out by the whole community and takes the form of stoning, its characteristic features being that every man of the congregation takes part in it and casts his stone. Murder and manslaughter, indeed, are not as yet classed among the offences against God, for which capital punishment at the hands of the community is due; bloodshed is in the main a private wrong still, and its punishment is left to the injured person. But it is not associated with blood-feud between clans, and the criminal is not protected by his family. Blood-revenge is tamed already and restricted by law to what we know as the talio. The shedder of blood is abandoned by his family, the heir and avenger may pursue and slay him. Should he take refuge in a sanctuary, he is safe if he has shed blood by mischance only. Otherwise the sanctuary affords him no protection. It is the right and duty of the community, represented by its elders, to drag him away from the altar and hand him over to the avenger. The act of slaughter is always left to the latter; the ceremonial infliction of capital punishment, execution by the congregation, is never the penalty assigned for murder or manslaughter. But the avenger is not allowed to take a ransom for the murderer or give him his life. For here the idea insinuates itself that bloodshed is not only a wrong and injury done to the individual, but a crime, that is to say an offence against God. The murderer has sinned also against the Deity, and his guilt lies upon the whole community, until they are rid of him.
Thus the religious obligation of the community, to wash away the blood shed within its borders, goes hand in hand with the individual obligation of vengeance. If the murderer cannot be discovered, vengeance is impossible; but a symbolical ceremony is substituted for the purification of the community, and the city within whose borders a man is found dead by an unknown hand must slay a cow in place of the murderer.
We see that among the Hebrews the ideas of crime and punishment had their root in religion; the crime is an offence against God, and its punishment is the purging of the community from this offence; execution is the only real punishment, and must be distinguished from talio on the one hand and mere chastisement on the other.
Among the Arabs the religious root of the penal law has withered away and nothing but human vengeance is left. This can hardly be the ancient conception. Vengeance itself is in its origin not a human passion merely, it is likewise a religious duty. True, this duty was originally believed to have been imposed, not by the Almighty, but by a demon. And this demon was the wrathful spirit of the murdered man himself, who would not let his clan rest until they had given him to drink the murderer’s blood for which he thirsted. We can still find traces of this belief among the Arabs. Amongst them the avenger of blood is under a solemn vow, exactly like the man who has to offer sacrifice or fulfil any other religious duty; he may not wash nor comb his hair, nor drink wine, with many other prohibitions of the same kind. As he accomplishes the act of vengeance, he must call upon the name of him for whom he takes it, in a brief form of words; then he is free and returned from the state of sanctification and uncleanness to that of cleanness and common life; exactly like a sacrificer after he has made a sacrifice.
But these are petrified remains, as it were, of a motive that has no present potency. The poetry which has come down to us invariably speaks only of the ungovernable rage of the avenger, not of the person to be avenged; of burning pain in the breast of the survivor, which demands relief at any price; and of the shame which weighs him down as long as the murderer still treads the earth alive. Moreover—and this is a particularly striking point—religion has not retained any influence upon actual law amongst the ancient Arabs, apart, perhaps, from the process of inquiry by curse and oath.
Ancient Arab law is singularly profane, dry, and formless; it is throughout a matter of bargain and contract, for even the penal law operates only through compensation and payment.
Such, in brief outline, is the picture of the Arabic community, a community devoid of supreme authority and executive power. We are fond of calling it patriarchal, but what do we mean by the phrase? Of the amenities of family life we find no trace, nor any trace of patriarchal guardianship. Each man has to give his help, if anything is to be done. There is more scope in such a community for the display of courage, self-sacrifice, and brotherly kindness than in our own, where the state seems to work like a machine for which we have merely to provide the fuel. It is a pity, however, that so fair an opportunity is not put to the fullest use. In critical cases, the corporate feeling on which the whole system depends is often shown by but few. There are hitches and difficulties everywhere, though in the desert the conditions of life are very simple, narrow, and easy to understand, its interests very uniform. No progressive civilisation can develop in this fashion; the desert is enough in itself to render development difficult. These weak foundations will bear no aspiring superstructure. Not even individual liberty, as we understand it, reaps advantage from the absence of the coercion of the state. For if the sense of kinship be too weak to control the wicked and force the indolent to fulfil the duties incumbent upon them, yet it is strong enough to prevent the growth of intellectual freedom in circles that possess and exercise it. Such liberty can only thrive in a state which, like Noah’s ark, contains all kinds of animals and lets them do as they please, not in a society of kinsmen which lays a spell upon their members from within, though it can impose no coercion from without.
The communities of Europe started, as there are many evidences to show, from primitive conditions like those in which the Arabs of the desert have remained. It is well that we should bear this in mind, and so estimate, quantæ molis erat romanam condere gentem, what amount of labour was required to create a stable system of law, independent of the individual.
FOOTNOTES
[41] [The subject-matter of this article originally appeared as an address delivered January 27th, 1900, at the university at Göttingen. It was published in pamphlet form, but is now for the first time translated and given wider currency by special arrangement with the author.]
[42] A guest whom the shadow of the tent has rendered sacred is after a certain time dismissed and resumes his journey.
