[39] When such an individual arises he becomes, if circumstances favor, a lawgiver, and the age of law supersedes the age of custom. Morality now consists in obedience to the law.
[40] Westermarck, The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas (1906), vol. i, chap. ii, and passim.
[41] “In early times the solidarity of the kinship is such that it does not occur to the individual to regard as unjust a suffering which he endures in behalf of, or along with, his people.”—Edward Caird, The Evolution of Religion (1894), p. 37.
[42] Hobhouse, Morals in Evolution (1906), vol. i, p. 283.
[43] The system of collective responsibility arises in part, it is true, from the belief that sin is contagious and infects all persons related to the transgressor. Therefore the innocent members of the family or group of the transgressor may be put out of the way as a merely preventive measure—not as a measure of justice or punishment. But the ethical element is seldom or never absent and it is this which gives the conception its importance for the student of morals.
[44] “Outlawry from the clan is the most effective of all weapons, because in primitive society the exclusion of a man from his kinsfolk means he is delivered over to the first comer absolutely without protection.”—Hobhouse, Morals in Evolution (1906), vol. i, p. 90.
[45] Gen. iv. 13, 14.
[46] “Blood atonement ... was one of the very earliest cases we can find in which there was a notion of duty and social obligation.”—Sumner, Folkways (1907), p. 506.
[47] “It [the feud] is the Southern sense of the solidarity of the family in opposition to extreme Northern individualism.”—Wines, Punishment and Reformation (1895), p. 33.
[48] On the Lex talionis consult Westermarck, The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas (1906), vol. i, pp. 177 ff.; Hobhouse, Morals in Evolution (1906), vol. i, pp. 84 ff.; Spencer, Principles of Ethics (1892), vol. i, pp. 369 ff. The principle embodied in the Lex talionis has played a large part in the jurisprudence of all peoples.