tions were developed in the in-group. So far as sympathy was
developed at all, it was in the in-group, between comrades. The custom
of blood revenge was a protection to all who were in a group of kinsmen.
It knit them all together and served their common interest against all
outsiders. Therefore it was a societalizing custom and institution.
Inside the kin-group adjudication, administration of justice by
precedents and customs, composition for wrongs by payments or penalties,
amercements by authority for breach of orders or violations of petty
taboo, and exile took the place of retaliation. In the in-group it was
the murderer who had to fear the ghost of the murdered. Religious rites
absolved the murderer from the ghosts or gods and delivered him from the
furies, who demanded revenge. The Hebrew law provided cities of refuge
for those who were guilty of accidental homicide.[1736] The manslayer
could go home at the death of the high priest.[1737] In 2 Sam. iii and
iv are cases of blood revenge and of efforts to suppress it. The
homicide in chapter iv is not a case of blood revenge but of partisan
murder.

+546. Parties to blood revenge.+ It was a very serious modification of
blood revenge when it was extended so that any kinsman of the murdered
man was bound to kill any kinsman of the murderer. Hagen[1738] says: "No
regulated societal common life is possible where blood revenge is in
full operation; not even on the primitive stage of the Bogjadim state,"
a village in German New Guinea. This is true if blood revenge is allowed
in the in-group, or if the in-group has very low integration, for blood
revenge sets every man against his neighbor and makes society
impossible. Krieger[1739] says of the same people: "The comradeship of
clansmen with each other in respect to their attitude towards out-groups
is most definite in blood revenge during the stage between the kin-group
organization and the lowest state organization." If a nation stops in
that stage, or even degenerates a little, blood revenge becomes a
symptom of a state of societal disease. It becomes firmly fixed, is
elaborated, continues beyond the stage of other things at which it can
be useful, and, as an institution, becomes a caricature. What is lacking
is an authority which can impose commands on the in-group and extrude
blood revenge from it. The Naga, in northeastern India, fifty years ago
lived in villages in which, if two men quarreled, all the others took
s