140 
settled life, and gTOuped themselves into clans and sometimes 
phratries. These British Columbia Indians, so far from l)ein”' a 
democratic people, I’ecognized three distinct j2,rades of society, nobles, 
commoners, and slaves, of whom the commoners made up the bulk 
of the populationd Slaves were, generally, prisoners of war or their 
children, and, allhoug;li well treated in most cases, possessed no ri(>;hts 
of any kind. They could marry in their own class only, and could be 
put to death at the whim of their masters. Theoretically, too, com- 
moners could inai'ry only with commoners, and nobles with nobles; 
Interior of a Coast Salisii lodfie at Esqiiiiiuilt. H.C. ( Rcprndtteetl, through the enurt- 
esg of the Royal Ontario .Ifii.seutn of Arvhaoiogy, from a jtaiiiting hy Paul Kane.) 
but the boundary line between these two f>rades was somewhat, 
indefinite and intermarriage not unknown. Probably many of the 
commoners had the same origin as the nobles, but, being descended 
from younger sons and daughters outside the main line of inherit- 
ance, they had fallen lower and lower in the social scale until they 
lost all the recognized hallmarks of nobility. 
Just as among the Iroquoians, the ultimate social unit in this 
area was the individual family, the ultimate political unit the 
village community. In the earliest days, according to Indian theory, 
1 MacLeod states that in the first half of the nineteenth centnry slaves composed about one-seventh 
of the population. MacI.eod, W. C. : “Some Social .Aspects of Aboriginal .American Slavery"; Journal 
de la Societe des AinericanLstes ile Paris, vol. xix, p. 123 (.P^u'is, 1927). 
