moRGAN.| NUMBER OF PERSONS IN A HOUSE IMPLIES COMMUNISM: 61 
was the duty of the women of the house to set food before him. An omis- 
sion to do this would have been a discourtesy amounting to an affront. If 
hungry, he ate, if not hungry, courtesy required that he should taste the 
food and thank the giver. It is seen to have been a usage running through 
three ethnic conditions of the Indian race, becoming stronger as the 
means of subsistence increased in variety and amount, and attaining its 
highest development among the Village Indians in the Middle Status of 
barbarism. It was an active, well-established custom of Indian society, 
practiced among themselves and among: strangers from other tribes, and 
very naturally extended to Europeans when they made their first appear- 
ance among them. Considering the number of the Spaniards often in mili- 
tary companies, and another fact which the aborigines were quick to notice, 
namely, that a white man consumed and wasted five times as much as an 
Indian required, their hospitality in many cases must have been grievously 
overtaxed.' 
Attention has been called to this law of hospitality, and to its univer- 
sality, for two reasons: firstly, because it implies the existence of common 
stores, which supplied the means for its practice; and secondly, because, 
wherever found, it implies communistic living in large households. It must 
be evident that this hospitality could not have been habitflally practiced 
by the Iroquois and other northern tribes, and much less by the Village 
Indians of Mexico, Central and South America, with such uniformity, if 
the custom in each case had depended upon the voluntary contributions of 
single families. In that event it would have failed oftener than it would 
have succeeded. The law of hospitality, as administered by the American 
aborigines, indicates a plan of life among them which has not been care- 
fully studied, nor have its effects been fully appreciated. Its explanation 
must be sought in the ownership of lands in common, the distribution of 
their products to households consisting of a number of families, and the 
practice of communism in living in the household. Common stores for 
lar ee households, and possibly for the village, with which to maintain vil- 
1“ The appetite of the Spaniards eed to the inertia insatiz ante voracious ; ma they 
affirmed that one Spaniard devoured more food in a day than was sufficient for ten Americans.”— 
(Robertson’s History of America, Lond. ed., 1856, i, p. 72.) 
