Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/463

 Even where the system had so far matured that the right of retaliation against a willful wrong-doer was recognized by his own family, revenge (as among the Israelites) was frequently taken on account of accidental or self-defensive acts of violence. It was a matter of course that the legitimacy of such revenge should be denied, and its exercise resented by the family upon which it was wreaked.

Again, the injured family in most instances claimed a right of revenge not only against the offending individual, but, in his absence, against any member of his family—a claim which was naturally and uniformly denied and resisted. In some societies the avenger seems to have thought it incumbent on him not only to take life for life, but to take two or more for one. Among the Congo people, according to Tuckey, if one be killed by an inferior, his family proceed to put all the male relatives of the guilty party to death. The prostitution of the practice is complete where, as among the Bushmen described by Reade, in his "Savage Africa," the stain of an injury suffered may be washed out by spilling the blood of any innocent third person, in case the guilty party is unknown or inaccessible. Superstition has occasionally operated as an additional irritant to an insane revenge. Schoolcraft relates that among some of the Dakota tribes of Indians each clan supposed the others to have supernatural powers whereby they could cause death. They hence frequently retaliated for deaths which they imagined to have been thus occasioned, though they were really due to natural causes.

From such diversities of view concerning the right of retaliation, and the justice of its application in particular instances, there inevitably ensued high carnivals of bloodshed and embroilment. While differing widely in degree among different races, the social disorder thus occasioned everywhere stood out in conspicuous contrast with that dearth of ordinary criminal acts which is characteristic of nearly all uncivilized tribes. Apart from the violence proceeding from blood feuds, the unfrequency among such tribes of most of the acts we consider criminal is very noteworthy. The great mass of offenses, whether against person or property, which disgrace and disfigure civilization, are the product of evil passions engendered by the exasperating inequalities of condition which are unknown to the experience of uncivilized races. Of the instances of general and extreme addiction to crime which are occasionally found in the lower tribes of mankind, a few, perhaps, must be classed as exceptions to this rule, but most of them are to be explained by the fact that the races so characterized are not really primitive, but are suffering, probably in an aggravated form, from the vices of a civilization which they formerly enjoyed, or with which they have at some time come in contact.

The inducements to crime in a primitive community are too weak and public opinion is too strong to admit of the rapid growth of criminal practices. Offenses against property necessarily partake of the