Page:Edinburgh Review Volume 158.djvu/357

 342 Early Law and Custom. Oct. ' their usages were less at one, than the rule which should ' determine which of the family should have the headship.' The most ancient mode of settling such contentions was that which we may call Natural Selection. The competing chiefs fought it out, and the strongest, the most crafty or unscru- pulous made good his claim. Sometimes one of the kinsmen ad the opportunity of crushing the others by a sudden blow, and an indiscriminate massacre of a household cleared a way for an aspirant to the vacant throne. The reader will call to mind several instances of such wholesale clearances in Hebrew history. Such was the story of Athaliah, 'that wicked 'woman,' the mother of Amaziah, who, when her son was dead, put to death all the seed royal of the house of Judah. One only, the child Joash, was secreted and saved to occupy eventually his father's throne. Meanwhile Athaliah 'reigned sons of Ahab by order of Jehu and that of his seventy brothers, save one who escaped, by Abimelech. In the Turkish Empire similar examples of conspiracy, massacre, and dethronements have been common history. A declaration that fratricide is a rule of the Ottoman State has been attributed to Ma- hommed II.; but the most ruthless exterminator of rival claimants was Muhommed III., who is said to have massacred nineteen of his brothers and drowned twelve of his father's wives who were supposed to be pregnant. It is obvious how much the practice of polygamy tends to multiply claimants to the succession, and increases the temptation to summary methods of disposing of them. We have had very recently before us in Afghanistan a striking illustration of the per- plexities caused by disputes among rival members of the same royal house. All the competitors in this case deduced their descent from Dost Mahomed Khan, and each set up a title to the succession. Shere Ali, after a hard struggle, ascended his father's throne, but he was not his father's eldest son. Then came Yakub Khan, who was not the eldest son of Shere Ali. The now reigning Abdurrahman Khan is not a son of Shere Ali at all, but the son of his elder brother. No rule but that of the strongest appears to exist for settling the claims of such rival pretenders to the Afghan throne. A civil war is the natural sequence of a vacancy. One system indeed of royal succession has from long antiquity prevailed in a reigning Mahommedan house, that of the Ottoman Sultans, under which not the son, but the eldest male relative, of the late sovereign succeeds. In unsettled times and among warlike communities there is much to be said in favour of this usage,
 * over the land.' Such, too, was the slaughter of the seventy