obligation to inherit the enmities as
well as the friendships of one's father and relatives; so is furthermore
the displacement of blood revenge by the Wergeld, a fine to be paid in
atonement of manslaughter and injuries. A generation ago this Wergeld
was considered a specifically German institution, but it has since been
found that hundreds of nations introduced this mitigation of gentile
blood revenge. Like the obligatory hospitality, it is found, for
instance, among the American Indians. Tacitus' description of the manner
in which hospitality was observed (Germania, chapt. 21) is almost
identical with Morgan's.

The hot and ceaseless controversy as to whether or not the Germans had
already made a definite repartition of the cultivated land at Tacitus'
time, and how the passages relating to this question should be
interpreted, is now a thing of the past. After the following facts had
been established: that the cultivated land of nearly all nations was
tilled collectively by the gens and later on by communistic family
groups, a practice which Cesar still found among the Suebi; that as a
result of this practice the land was re-apportioned periodically; and
that this periodical repartition of the cultivated land was preserved in
Germany down to our days--after such evidence we need not waste any more
breath on the subject. A transition within 150 years from collective
cultivation, such as Cesar expressly attributes to the Suebi, to
individual cultivation with annual repartition of the soil, such as
Tacitus found among the Germans, is surely progress enough for any one.
The further transition from this stage to complete private ownership of
land during such a short period and without any external intervention
would involve an absolute impossibility. Hence I can only read in
Tacitus what he states in so many words: They change (or re-divide) the
cultivated land every year, and enough land is left for common use. It
is the stage of agriculture and appropriation of the soil which exactly
tallies with the contemporaneous gentile constitution of the Germans.

I leave the preceding paragraph unchanged, just as it stood in former
editions. Meantime the question has assumed another aspect. Since
Kovalevsky has demonstrated that the patriarchal household community
existed nearly everywhere, perhaps even everywhere, as the connecting
link between the matriarchal communistic and the modern isolated family,
the question is no longer