Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/317

Rh a tendency for the stronger to aggress on the weaker; yet, generally, consciousness of the evils resulting from aggressive conduct serves to restrain. Everywhere among primitive peoples, trespasses are followed by counter-trespasses. Says Turner, of the Tannese, "Adultery and some other crimes are kept in check by the fear of club-law." Fitzroy tells us that the Patagonian, "if he does not injure or offend his neighbor, is not interfered with by others ": personal vengeance being the penalty for injury. We read of the Uaupés that "they have very little law of any kind; but what they have is of strict retaliation—an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." And that the lex talionis tends to establish a distinction between what each member of the community may safely do and what he may not safely do, and consequently to give a sanction to actions within a certain range but not beyond that range, is obvious. Though, says Schoolcraft of the Chippewayans, they "have no regular government, as every man is lord in his own family, they are influenced more or less by certain principles which conduce to their general benefit": one of the principles named being recognition of private property.

How mutual limitation of activities originates the ideas and sentiments implied by the phrase "natural rights," we are shown most distinctly by the few peaceful tribes which have either nominal governments or none at all. Beyond those facts which illustrate scrupulous regard for one another's claims among the Todas, Santals, Lepchas, Bodo, Chakmas, Jakuns, Arafuras, etc., we have the fact that the utterly-uncivilized Wood-Yeddahs, without any social organization at all, "think it perfectly inconceivable that any person should ever take that which does not belong to him, or strike his fellow, or say anything that is untrue." Thus it becomes clear, alike theoretically and historically, that while the positive element in the right to carry on life-sustaining activities originates from the laws of life, that negative element which gives ethical character to it, originates from the conditions produced by social aggregation.

So alien to the truth, indeed, is the alleged creation of rights by government, that, contrariwise, rights having been established more or less clearly before government arises, become obscured as government develops, along with that militant activity which, both by the taking of slaves and the establishment of ranks, produces status; and the recognition of rights begins again to get definiteness only as fast as militancy ceases to be chronic and governmental power declines.

When we turn from the life of the individual to the life of the society, the same lesson is taught us.