Page:Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines.djvu/36

 acceptance or rejection. If the nomination made was accepted by both it became complete, but if either refused it was thereby set aside and a new election was made by the gens. When the choice made by the gens had been accepted by the phratries it was still necessary, as before stated, that the new sachem, or the new chief, should be invested by the council of the confederacy, which alone had power to invest with office.

The phratry was without governmental functions in the strict sense of the phrase, these being confined to the gens tribe and confederacy; but it entered into their social affairs with large administrative powers, and would have concerned itself more and more with their religious affairs as the condition of the people advanced. Unlike the Grecian phratry and the Roman curia, it had no official head. There was no chief of the phratry as such, and no religious functionaries belonging to it as distinguished from the gens and tribe. The phratric institution among the Iroquois was in its rudimentary archaic form; but it grew into life by natural and inevitable development, and remained permanent because it met necessary wants. Every institution of mankind which attained permanence will be found linked with a perpetual want. With the gens tribe and confederacy in existence the presence of the phratry was substantially assured. It required time, however, and further experience to manifest all the uses to which it might be made subservient.

Among the Village Indians of Mexico and Central America the phratry must have existed, reasoning upon general principles, and have been a more fully developed and influential organization than among the Iroquois. Unfortunately mere glimpses at such an institution are all that can be found in the teeming narratives of the Spanish writers within the first century after the Spanish conquest. The four "lineages" of the Tlascalans who occupied the four quarters of the pueblo of Tlascala were, in all probability, so many phratries. They were sufficiently numerous for four tribes, but as they occupied the same pueblo and spoke the same dialect the phratric organization was apparently a necessity. Each lineage or phratry, so to call it, had a distinct military organization, a peculiar costume and banner, and its head war-chief (Teuctli), who was its general military commander. They went forth to battle by phratries. The organization of a military