In general, the effect of Adoption was to transfer the adopted child from his own family to that of the adoptive parent. At Rome the rite included the detestatio sacrorum, or relinquishment of the original household, and the transitio in sacra, or initiation into the new worship. By these means the child was discharged from his natural family and received into the new one.[421.5] The change of worship is, in that plane of civilisation where the custom of adoption is most fully developed, of the essence of the proceeding. Its very object often is to preserve the ancestral cult by artificially providing persons to carry it on. This is the most prominent idea in the Laws of Manu.[421.6] Annexed to the ancestral cult was the inheritance. Whosoever performed the one was entitled to the other, or at least to a share in the other. In course of time, as the duty decayed and ceased to be acknowledged, the rights of property remained: an excellent precedent for the English House of Lords in insisting on the rights of property while looking askance at its duties. The adopted child is in fact regarded exactly as a natural-born child; he obtains all the privileges, and is charged with all the duties, restrictions and disabilities of a natural-born child. He becomes of one flesh with his new parents and their other offspring, whether natural or adopted. He is entitled to support, to maintenance in his quarrels, to protection, to his fair and equal share of the inheritance. He is liable to obedience, to maintain the family quarrels, to assist in paying the family debts and obligations, to unite in the family worship; and he is debarred from marrying all whom the members of his adopted family are restricted from marrying. As a consequence, adoption can only take place with the assent of both families, or of a council of elders or some more formal tribunal on behalf of the community. Such a tribunal exercises the functions, not merely of judge of the propriety of the adoption, but also of the necessary witness to its validity. And if we do not find the formality always complied with in the punctilious manner of the Roman law, we may usually trace it with greater or less distinctness wherever the custom of adoption has obtained.[422.1]
Passing, with this hasty sketch of Adoption, away from the inner circle of family relationships, let us look at one or two aspects of the wider clan-life, illustrating the strength of the blood-tie.
“The birth-ties of kindred are reckoned the only strong ones,” says Countess Martinengo-Cesaresco, speaking of folksongs; and the observation might be extended with hardly any qualification to every species of tradition. The bond of blood has always proved stronger than any other force that can sway human nature, until it encounters the overmastering energy of one of the great world-religions, or becomes distracted and spent amid the complexities of modern life. Weakened as it is in Europe nowadays, it is yet not entirely dissipated. Its claims are put forth more timidly, but they are still within certain limits respected. To the utmost of those limits they are still efficient instruments in the hands of the poet, the playwright and the novelist,—and that not only on the moral side, where we are accustomed to appeals founded upon kinship, but also on what I may call the physical side. An unaccountable thrill, we are told, shoots through a father who meets unwittingly a child whom he has never seen, or has seen but for a moment long years before. This involuntary recognition of the same blood is a convention not yet wholly discarded by the writers who thus aim at affecting our emotions, because it has not quite passed out of the shadowy region bordering our clear beliefs into the limbo of things that neither prescribe our action nor convince and captivate our imagination. But the Italian peasant, a thousand years behindhand, a thousand leagues deeper in the realm where faith and fancy reign in indissoluble consort on a double throne, undisturbed by the far-off frontier raids of criticism and doubt,—the Italian peasant admits the extreme demands of blood in the vendetta, and believes that when a bottle supposed to contain a portion of the blood of Saint Januarius “was presented to the body such joy was evinced that the blood had nearly burst from the bottle.”[424.1] If such were the conduct of blood severed for, say, fifteen centuries from the body of which it had once formed part, what may not be expected of blood still flowing in the veins of living men, themselves both parts of one body, the kin,—blood whose stream has welled from the same fount only a generation or so ago? In The Book of the Pious by Jehuda ben Samuel the Pious, who lived at Ratisbon about the year 1200, a story is told, founded on the idea of the physical unity of a kindred. A rich man died while travelling abroad, having at the time of his death a large sum of money in his possession. The servant stole this money and gave himself out as his master’s son. Shortly after the rich man’s departure from home, however, a son was born to him, who, when grown up, sought the aid of the Gaon Saadja. Saadja, it appears, was an historical personage who flourished at Sura in the former half of the tenth century. He advised the youth to apply to the king; and the king commissioned Saadja to decide the matter. The Gaon, accordingly, having the son and the servant both brought before him, caused a vein of each of them to be opened, and one of the bones of the dead man to be fetched from his grave. He laid the bone first in the servant’s blood, but without effect. He then laid it in the son’s blood, which it immediately sucked up; for the bone and the blood, we are told, were of one body. Saadja, therefore, gave judgment in favour of the son, directing the estate to be restored to him.[425.1]
Two other examples may be given of widely sundered peoples among whom essentially the same superstition is current. It is believed in the west of Europe—certainly in Brittany and Flanders—that the body of one drowned will bleed on the approach of a kinsman.[425.2] The Zulus speak of sympathy by the navel. It is their conviction that a man will recognise his kindred by some mysterious influence of the navel. “A man,” they say, “knows one of his blood-relations by the navel. We have been wondering at the treatment of the man by So-and-so. We thought he knew him; yet he did not know him; he sympathised with him by the navel only.”[425.3] Obviously this is the birth-tie.
The most instructive application of the doctrine that the kin is, in much more than a metaphorical sense, one body, is to be found in the collective responsibility of the clan. Illustrations might be cited from every corner of the known world. But to do so would be to repeat the same evidence, frequently in the same words, over and over again. I shall, therefore, give only a few of the more striking instances.
I mentioned a page or two back the extreme demands of blood as found in the Italian vendetta. The words were only just written, when I took up the newspaper of the day, and read an account of a trial for murder arising out of a blood-feud in Dalmatia. The actors in the tragedy were not Italians, but Slavs. The facts were shortly these. Two brothers, having quarrelled with a neighbour about some goats, threw themselves upon him with their daggers; but he defended himself with his pistol, and, having killed one, was tried for murder. The jury properly acquitted him, on the ground that he was only acting in self-defence. Hardly had he left the prison when his surviving assailant, with another brother, hastened to his house. They found there only their foe’s wife and daughters; and they waited and watched. Soon they espied the acquitted man’s younger brother, a boy of fourteen, carrying a pitcher of water. Crying “The devil threw thee in our way,” they seized him, and stabbed him so quickly that he had no time even to cry out. They were speedily arrested, tried, found guilty of murder, and condemned, the one to death, and the other to eighteen years’ penal servitude. They protested against the sentence, and appealed to the Court of Cassation at Vienna. There their counsel had the assurance to plead that “in Dalmatia it is every man’s duty to take vengeance where blood has been shed; and that the people feel it right to pursue a family, one of whose members has killed a connection of their own, as long as there is a male descendant.” This was a little more than a civilised court of justice could stand; and it will be no fault of the judges if the Dalmatian savages do not learn that the unity of the kin is not a doctrine of modern jurisprudence.[426.1]
The story shows that we must regard the collective responsibility of the clan as twofold; first looking at the offended clan, and then at the offending. What Professor Robertson Smith points out concerning the Semites is universally true, namely, that when a member of the clan has been slain, the others say, not “The blood of such an one has been spilt,” but “Our blood has been spilt.” The injury is felt by the entire body; and it is the business of the entire body to revenge it. Conversely, not merely the man who commits the wrong is liable for it. His whole kin is involved in the guilt, and must suffer for it until atonement shall have been made. Colonel Ellis, writing of the peoples of the Slave and Gold Coasts, lays down this rule in distinct terms. “The family collectively,” he says, “is responsible for all crimes and injuries to person or property committed by any one of its members, and each member is assessible for a share of the compensation to be paid. On the other hand, each member of the family receives a share of the compensation paid to it for any crime or injury committed against the person or property of any one of its members. Compensation is always demanded from the family instead of from the individual wrong-doer, and is paid to the family instead of to the individual wronged.” And he draws attention to the resemblance of this custom of collective responsibility and indemnification to that enunciated in the old Welsh laws.[427.1]
Happily for mankind the blood-feud is not everywhere so relentless as it is presented to us in Dalmatia. Even savages cannot afford to be for ever engaged in warfare to the death; and that is what would happen if blood were only to be wiped out by blood. The practice of commuting revenge for payment has therefore very generally arisen. The distinction between crimes, as wrongs committed against the State, and private injuries classed by lawyers as torts and breaches of contract, is unknown in the lower stages of civilisation. There was at first no State, and when the State came into existence it was but loosely constituted. Public crimes were confined to treason and the like: robbery and murder were nothing more than private wrongs. Commutation for these was precisely on the same footing as for insult or debt. It was no more unnatural to take payment for the murder of a blood-brother than for a sheep; it no more interfered with the course of justice or the rights of the State than the barter for a tusk of ivory or a bag of gold-dust. To omit to pay the price of the ivory or the gold-dust was as much a wrong against a clan to which, or to one member of which, it was due, as to commit murder. The price of a murder might be heavier, or it might not. But, alike, the price of the goods or of the blood must be paid by the clan of the man indebted or offending. To draw a line between wrongs done to the clan and wrongs done to the individual required a much greater development, on the one side, of the individual, on the other side, of the State, at the expense of the clan or the family. Until that point had been reached, whenever compensation was accepted for a wrong to the kin, every member of the kin, as in the West African custom depicted by Colonel Ellis, was entitled to his share; because the wrong to the kin had reached and was shared by all. Among the Garos of Bengal, proposals of marriage must come from the woman. If a man make the first advances it is an insult, not to the individual woman, but to the whole mahári (literally, motherhood) or kin, “a stain only to be obliterated by the blood of pigs and liberal libations of beer at the expense,” not of the individual offender, but of the mahári to which he belongs.[429.1] Going back to West Africa, we find that on the river Comoe, as on the Slave Coast, where a man of one community is indebted to a man of another community, the latter has the right to seize the goods of any member of his debtor’s community, on the ground that the group is collectively responsible for the debts of its members.[429.2] Examples might be added from every part of the globe; but they can be all summed up in the Fijian philosophy as expressed by an old resident to Mr. Fison, while explaining a bloody feud which lasted for years in reference to the shooting of a dog. “It’s just like this, sir; in a manner o’ speakin’, say as me and Tom Farrell here has a difficulty, and gets to punchin’ one another. If he plugs me in the eye, I don’t feel duty bound to hit him back azackly on the same spot. If I can get well in on him anywheres handy, I ain’t partickler. And that’s how these niggers reckons it.”[429.3]
Nor does the solidarity of the kin for this purpose disappear without difficulty even after the State has come into existence and established its sole cognisance of crime. The offender’s relatives continue liable with himself to punishment. This explains the wholesale punishment of barbarous nations, involving persons whom we should regard as absolutely innocent. Achan’s sons and daughters were stoned with their father. The customs of the Habura in the North-west Provinces of India require that when a crime has been committed by members of a certain horde, the chief shall determine who are to be given up. “Usually a compromise is made with the police; two out of six, or three out of eight, are made over to justice, the rest escaping. All the chief does is to repeat a certain form of words, and then, taking two of the grains of wheat offered to their god, he places them on the head of the scapegoat. The oath of the brotherhood is upon him, and whether he be guilty or not he confesses to the police magistrate, or judge, and goes to the gallows or a life-long exile, confident that his chief and brethren will, as they are bound, feed and protect the wife and children he leaves behind, even before their own.”[430.1] The ancient laws of Ireland provide elaborately for the responsibility of the clan in respect of crimes committed by members. In their case, however, the conception of the crime as a debt due to the injured clan had not yet been wholly effaced; for the provisions for sharing the compensation are equally elaborate.[430.2] The customs of the Teutons recognised the same responsibility; and in the corruption of blood and forfeiture of property to the crown which, until the legislation of about a quarter of a century ago, were entailed in this country by conviction not only for treason but for any felony, we may discover the last remnant in modern laws of the ancient rule of visiting the sins of the individual upon the whole of his kindred.[430.3]
The forms of medical treatment examined in a former chapter exhibited the connection which remained unsevered when portions of the body, or of its issues, or clothing, had been detached; so that it was sufficient to subject these objects to healing or sacred influences in order to effect the cure of the man himself. But if the kin together form one body in any substantial sense, the treatment of other members than the one actually suffering, if not sufficient to restore him to health, will at all events help his recovery. Among the Dieyerie of South Australia, if a child meet with an accident, all its relations are struck over the head with sticks or boomerangs until the blood flows. And this blood-letting by deputy is held to alleviate the infant’s pain.[431.1] In civilised times, when the feeling of kindred has become attenuated and the real reason for this vicarious treatment consequently lost, an intimate friend may sometimes take the place of a relative. He may perform the pilgrimage, or undergo the remedy. A Devonshire prescription for curing a friend of boils is to go into a churchyard on a dark night and walk six times round the grave of a person who has been interred the previous day, and crawl over it three times. If the sufferer be a man the ceremony must be performed by a woman, and vice versâ.[432.1] Parallel with this are pilgrimages made by a friend or relative in the name of a sick person, of which I have cited some instances in a former chapter; and possibly the same principle dictated the early Christian practice of “baptism for the dead.”