THE ETHICS OF TRIBAL SOCIETY. 301 



the Napoleonic coup d'etat, and now betrays serious symptoms of 

 a relapse, which it is to be hoped do not portend an imperial res- 

 toration. As a rule, such manifestations may be regarded as evi- 

 dences of internal derangement, which is pretty sure to break out 

 sooner or later in some violent disorder. Knownothingism in the 

 United States was the symptom of such a crisis, although its indi- 

 cations were at that time only partially understood. 



It is but recently, in fact, that civilized nations have rid them- 

 selves of the most obnoxious relics of ethnocentric prejudice in 

 their legislation such, for example, as the gahella hereditaria, 

 which discriminated against foreigners in matters of inheritance ; 

 and the detradus 'personalis, which virtually punished emigra- 

 tion by the imposition of a heavy fine. These vestiges of vassal- 

 age were removed from the statute-books of the German states in 

 relation to each other by the acts of federation of 1815, and have 

 been successively abolished between Germany and other countries 

 by independent treaties. 



The English law of extradition with other European powers 

 still refuses to deliver up or to prosecute an Englishman who has 

 committed a felony in a foreign land, unless the crime has been 

 committed against one of his own countrymen. Some years ago 

 a case of this kind occurred in Zurich, and still more recently in 

 Munich. In the latter instance, one of the burglars, although re- 

 siding in London, proved to be an American by birth, and was 

 therefore handed over to the Bavarian police, and finally sen- 

 tenced to ten years' imprisonment, while his English confederate 

 in crime was set at liberty. Here we have, as the result of insu- 

 larism, a survival of ethnocentric ethics in its crassest and most 

 offensive form, such as one would expect to find only among a 

 people still in the tribal stage of development. 



In the volume already cited. Sir Henry Sumner Maine not only 

 shows kinship to have been the original basis of society, but also 

 indicates the process by which mankind may have gradually 

 grown out of this primitive condition. The head of the family 

 soon became through natural increase the head of a clan or tribe. 

 The patriarch possessed the authority and exercised the functions 

 of a chieftain over his lineal and collateral descendants, who were 

 known as his men and were called by his name. He was honored 

 and obeyed as their first man, Filrst, or prince, their stem-sire or 

 king, an appellation which has nothing to do with personal "can- 

 ning " or cunning, as Carlyle, in his excessive admiration of hu- 

 man force and faculty, would fain make us believe, but refers 

 solely to race {kuni). The ruler was an ethnarch in the strictest 

 sense of the term, and held his position by virtue of his primo- 

 genitureship or procreative seniority. 



The correctness of this theory, so far as the genetic connection 



