632 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



age, each member of a tribe is subject the knocking out of teeth, 

 the gashing of the flesh, the tattooing, the submission to torture it 

 needs but to remember that from these imperative customs there is 

 no escape, to see that the directive force which exists before political 

 agency arises, and which afterward makes the political agency its 

 organ, is the gradually formed opinion of countless preceding genera- 

 tions ; or rather, not the opinion, which, strictly speaking, is an intel- 

 lectual product wholly impotent, but the emotion associated with the 

 opinion. This we everywhere find to be at the outset the chief con- 

 trolling jDOwer. 



The notion of the Tupis, that, " if they depai'ted from the customs 

 of their forefathers, they should be destroyed," may be named as a 

 definite manifestation of the force with which this transmitted opinion 

 acts. In one of the rudest tribes of the Indian hills, the Juangs, less 

 clothed even than Adam and Eve are said to have been, the women 

 long adhered to their bunches of leaves in the belief that change was 

 wrong. Of the Koranna Hottentots we read that, "when ancient 

 usages are not in the way, every man seems to act as is right in his 

 own eyes," Though the Damara chiefs " have the power of governing 

 arbitrarily, yet they venerate the traditions and customs of their an- 

 cestors." Smith says, " Laws the Araucanians can scarcely be said to 

 have, though there are many ancient usages which they hold sacred 

 and strictly observe." According to Brooke, among the Dyaks cus- 

 tom simply seems to have become the law, and breaking of the cus- 

 tom leads to a fine. In the minds of some clans of the Malagasy, 

 "innovation and injury are . . . inseparable, and the idea of improve- 

 ment altogether inadmissible." 



This control by inherited usages is not simply as strong in groups 

 of men who are politically unorganized, or but little organized, as it 

 is in advanced tribes and nations, but it is stronger. As Sir John Lub- 

 bock remarks : " No savage is free. All over the world his daily life 

 is regulated by a complicated and apparently most inconvenient set of 

 customs (as forcible as laws), of quaint prohibitions and privileges." 

 Though one of these rude societies appears to be structureless, yet its 

 ideas and usages form a kind of invisible framework for it, serving 

 rigorously to restrain certain classes of its actions. And this invisible 

 framework has been slowly and unconsciously shaped, during daily 

 activities impelled by prevailing feelings and guided by prevailing 

 thoughts, through generations stretching back into the far past. 



In brief, then, before any definite agency for social control is de- 

 veloped, there exists a control arising partly from the public opinion 

 of the living and more largely from the public opinion of the dead. 



But now let us note definitely a truth implied in some of the illus- 

 trations above given the truth that, when a political agency has been 

 evolved, its power, largely dependent on present public opinion, is 



