ils
of gentile chiefs and military leaders who coveted actual royal power.
It was the highest constitution which the gentile order could produce;
it was the standard constitution of the higher stage of barbarism. If
society passed the limits for which this constitution sufficed, then the
end of the gentile order had come. It collapsed and the state took its
place.

FOOTNOTES:

[27] Author's note to the fourth edition.

During a few days passed in Ireland, I once more became conscious to
what extent the rural population is still living in the conceptions of
the gentile period. The great landholder, whose tenant the farmer is,
still enjoys a position similar to that of a clan chief, who has to
supervise the cultivation of the soil in the interest of all, who is
entitled to a tribute from the farmer in the form of rent, but who also
has to assist the farmer in cases of need. Likewise everyone in
comfortable circumstances is considered under obligation to help his
poorer neighbors whenever they are in need. Such assistance is not
charity, it is simply the prerogative of the poor gentile, which the
rich gentile or the chief of the clan must respect. This explains why
the professors of political economy and the jurists complain of the
impossibility of imparting the idea of the modern private property to
the Irish farmers. Property that has only rights, but no duties, is
absolutely beyond the ken of the Irishman. No wonder that so many
Irishmen who are suddenly cast into one of the modern great cities of
England and America, among a population with entirely different moral
and legal standards, despair of all morals and justice, lose all hold
and become an easy prey to demoralization.

[28] Author's note.

The Greeks know this special sacredness of the bond between the mother's
brother and his nephew, a relic of maternal law found among many
nations, only in the mythology of heroic times. According to Diodorus
IV., 34, Meleagros kills the sons of Thestius, the brother of his mother
Althaia. The latter regards this deed as such a heinous crime that she
curses the murderer, her own son, and prays for his death. "It is said
that the gods fulfilled her wish and ended the life of Meleagros."
According to the same Diordorus, IV., 44, the Argonauts under Herakles
land in Thracia and there find that Phineus, at the instigation of his
second wife, shamefully maltreats his two sons, the offspring of his
first deserted wife, the Bo