596 THE ''nation" AS AN ELEMENT IN ANTHROPOLOGY. 



a white uiau, they could obtain no redress from the tribal government 

 with whom they had treaty relations. They regarded such indolence a 

 breach of faith and proof of evil intention. It was nothing of the kind. 

 A crime of blood was something which concerned the consanguine 

 gens only; it was a family matter with which the tribal council had no 

 concern and about which it could take no action ; it was in no sense a 

 crime against the commonwealth. 



This view of the case was something wholly incomprehensible to the 

 Europeans, who belonged to states where a felony or a breach of the 

 peace is an attack on the community. In other words, ethnic jurispru- 

 dence is something quite different when the nation appears on the stage 

 of history from what it is in the tribal condition. 



This contrast runs through the whole of ethics. In a thoughtful 

 article, published some years ago in the Zeitachrift fiir Efhnologie, Dr. 

 Kulischer j)ointed out that in primitive conditions ethics presents a 

 dualistic aspect: It demands the cultivation of kindness, protection, 

 assistance, love, and peace to our friends, but quite as much does it 

 prescribe hatred, enmity, robbery, murder, and deception toward our 

 enemy. The nation breaks down the walls of narrow tribal animosi- 

 ties; it increases the number of those whose patriotic interests are in 

 common, and thus widens the area of duty and the conceptions of 

 ethics; but who dares say that our own conceptions of ethics are much 

 beyond the primitive stage when still the greatest hero among us is the 

 most skillful in murdering men — the most expert military commander? 



Anything like a categorical imperative in ethics, a prescription of 

 duty which should be the law of everyone toward all men would be 

 out of the question in a society based on relationship or on narrow 

 territorial considerations. 



Nowhere does this ethical contrast become more apparent than in 

 the relations of the one to the'many, of the individual to the mass, a 

 feature in ethnic jurisprudence admirably brought out in his recent 

 masterly work on the subject by Dr. Albert Hermann Post. 



In the tribal, totemic. or consanguine condition of government the 

 individual is not regarded as an independent unit. The obligations he 

 has to fultill are those of his gens, and his actions are regarded, not as 

 his own, but as those of a member of his gens. 



If he robs or murders, the punishment falls, not on him personally, 

 but on the gens; and if blood money or other compensation is 

 demanded, it is not from him that it is required, but from the gens. 



He in turn is liable for any crime his fellow-clansmen may commit; 

 and in this vicarious expiation he sees nothing in conflict with the 

 principles of abstract justice. He has not yet reached to the conscious- 

 ness of himself as an individual. He accepts the obligations of his 

 clan as his own, and is scarcely aware that he suffers any diminution 

 because he can create no obligations himself otherwise than in his posi- 

 tion as a representative of the clan or gens. 



