King s Peace and English Peaee-HIagistraey. 7 



But if the extremely early origin of the clan-state places 

 the moral condition of ancient society before us in a more 

 favorable light — enables us to see that archaic men were not 

 wholly given over to anarchy ; on the other hand, in the same 

 fact must be sought the true explanation of the remarkably 

 slow development of the modern conception of the national 

 peace. The clan-state, generally speaking, is prehistoric. 

 At the very dawn of history it has already been superseded 

 by a much more expanded form of social organism. In the 

 poems of Homer and in the earliest Italic legends the polls 

 or city appears as the ultimate political unit. In the pages 

 of Tacitus even the pagus or gan-state, composed of a group 

 of local gentes, has already yielded to the tribe, or volker- 

 schaft as the bearer of political sovereignty. Both polls 

 and volkerschaft, though representing in some measure the 

 principle of localization, are still held together by the double 

 bond of kinship and religion, as was the clan from which each 

 has been evolved ; but in the higher group the tie is weaker, 

 often artificial. The clan represents that principle of exclu- 

 siveness, that spirit of race isolation and religious isolation, 

 which constitutes the almost insuperable obstacle to political 

 development in early Aryan society. Hence it is that the 

 clan, long after it has ceased to be autonomous and has 

 become .a subordinate member of a higher organization, 

 clings so tenaciously to the right of administering the blood- 

 feud. Hence that remarkable struggle on the part of the 

 state, extending in some instances far down into the historic 

 period, to wrest from the kin exclusive jurisdiction over all 

 violations of the peace as offences against herself. It is not 

 a struggle between the state and the untamable passions of 

 individual men ; but between a new and, so to speak, usurp- 

 ing authority and an old, once sovereign body, whose very con- 

 stitution demands retribution for the blood of the slain, as a 

 religious duty to the ancestral gods. 



Let us now trace briefly the history of that struggle among 



out by Leist, AU-Arisches Jus Geniitiin, j\2t, ff. ; and, on the clan-peace, cf. Dahn, 

 Deutsche Geschichie, I, 1 85-6. 



241 



