avenger of blood, "when he meeteth him."[259]

Thus, gradually, the principle became established that the community
might intervene, not merely to insure that vengeance was executed in due
form, but to determine the facts, and thus courts which determined by
legal process the guilt or innocence of the accused were established.

It does not appear that courts of justice were ever set up within the
kinship group for the trial of offenses, although efforts were made
there first of all, by the elders and the headmen, to compromise
quarrels and compose differences.

Courts first came into existence, the evidence indicates, when society
was organized over wider areas and after some authority had been
established outside of the local community. As society was organized
over a wider territory, control was extended to ever wider areas of
human life until we have at present a program for international courts
with power to intervene between nations to prevent wars.[260]

Society, like the individual man, moves and acts under the influence of
a multitude of minor impulses and tendencies which mutually interact to
produce a more general tendency which then dominates all the individuals
of the group. This explains the fact that a group, even a mere casual
collection of individuals like a crowd, is enabled to act more or less
as a unit. The crowd acts under the influence of such a dominant
tendency, unreflectively, without definite reference to a past or a
future. The crowd has no past and no future. The public introduces into
this vortex of impulses the factor of reflection. The public presupposes
the existence of a common impulse such as manifests itself in the crowd,
but it presupposes, also, the existence of individuals and groups of
individuals representing divergent tendencies. These individuals
interact upon one another _critically_. The public is, what the crowd is
not, a discussion group. The very existence of discussion presupposes
objective standards of truth and of fact. The action of the public is
based on a universe of discourse in which things, although they may and
do have for every individual somewhat different value, are describable
at any rate in terms that mean the same to all individuals. The public,
in other words, moves in an objective and intelligible world.

Law is based on custom. Custom is group habit. As the group acts it
creates custom. There is implicit in custom a conception and a rule of
action, wh