186 
pains and penalties beside the payment of an Eric. If the murderer 
fled, or was not given up to justice, or had not the means of paying 
his Eric, it was to be levied from the tribe to which he belonged. 
For it was the policy of the lrish law, that the whole tribe should be 
accountable for the crimes of each of its individual members ; 
thereby rendering every man an interested conservator of the public 
peace. The law provided for the distribution of the fine, when paid, 
amongst certain persons of the tribe to which the deceased belonged ; 
of which the wife or child of the deceased received the greater part, 
and the ceann fine, or head of the tribe, also received a considerable 
proportion. ‘This was but reasonable ; because the chief had lost 
the services of the deceased, and was obliged to provide for the ne- 
cessities of all the members of his tribe, in which were included the 
wife and children of the person murdered. That the judge was not 
allowed to allot to himself “ a greater portion of the fine than unto 
“ the plaintiffes’ or parties grieved,” nor indeed any portion at all, 
may be concluded from the silence on this subject of the code of 
laws called Seanchus bheg ; where, as we have seen above at page 
169, the rights, privileges and rewards of the Brehons were parti- 
cularly defined. 
But, supposing the Irish custom of punishing culprits by the im- 
position of a pecuniary mulct were as barbarous as Spencer and 
others would wish to make it appear, it was surely not more barbar- 
ous amongst the Irish than it was amongst several other nations ; and, 
amongst the rest, Spencer’s own countrymen, who punished the 
crime of murder by a fine on the murderer. 
That the ancient Greeks satisfied by a fine for the crime of mur- 
der appears from more than one passage in Homer. 
