THE ETHICS OF TRIBAL SOCIETY. 297 



superseded by better and more comprehensive methods and ended 

 by playing only the frivolous part of a sentimental pastime in 

 social life, like the modern philopena, they had originally a more 

 serious purpose and were of no small importance as means of pro- 

 moting intertribal intercourse and thus encouraging trade and 

 leading to the establishment of commercial treaties. 



Another step toward the realization of the conception of human 

 brotherhood was the custom established at a very early period 

 whereby chiefs of tribes came to address each other as kinsmen 

 and members of one family. This assumption of consanguinity, 

 which originated in the desire of dynasties to strengthen their 

 position and to perpetuate their power, naturally led to increase 

 of friendly intercourse and to frequent intermarriages, so that 

 they finally became in fact what they at first claimed to be by a 

 polite and politic fiction. Traces of this usage are found in the 

 oldest records of royalty. Among the treasures of the Berlin and 

 British Museums are preserved two hundred and forty-one tablets 

 of cuneiform inscriptions containing letters written to Amenophis 

 III and Amenophis IV of Egypt by Burnaburiash, King of Baby- 

 lonia, and Dushratta, King of Mesopotamia, which show that, at 

 least sixteen centuries before the Christian era, " dear brother " 

 was the ceremonial title of salutation which monarchs were wont 

 to use in their epistolary correspondence. This feigning of a com- 

 mon lineage still survives among crowned heads, and the vilest 

 plebeian adventurer who, by force or fraud, gets himself pro- 

 claimed king or emperor is admitted to the select circle of sover- 

 eigns and greeted as " dear cousin." 



Principles, once grown obsolete, are denounced as prejudices ; 

 religious beliefs, which have been supplanted by superior creeds, 

 are scoffed at as superstitions ; and dethroned deities haunt the 

 imagination of their former worshiper as demons. In like man- 

 ner, the lower classes of civilized communities correspond, in a 

 measure, to the lower races, and reflect atavistically the ideas and 

 passions of primitive man ; and in periods of great social and 

 political upheaval we are often rudely brought face to face with 

 tumultuous masses of these strata of palaeozoic humanity violently 

 and unpleasantly thrown to the surface. It crops out in the Eng- 

 lish boor, who at the sight of a stranger is ever ready to "'eave 

 'arf a brick at 'im," and would deem the neglect of this duty a 

 treasonable lack of local patriotism and loyalty to time-honored 

 tradition; in the Cretan herdsman, who instinctively seizes his 

 cudgel whenever a traveler in trousers passes by; and in the 

 Egyptian fellah, who teaches his children to spit at every man 

 with a hat on and cry out : " Yd nasrdniy I Yd khinzir ! O you 

 Nazarene ! O you pig ! " 



The publican, in some parts of southern Italy, is still disposed 



