m the life
of his best friend. Did the Greenlander know that it would probably
cost him his own life, his sense of responsibility, we may surmise,
might be somewhat quickened. On the other hand, duelling is not a
satisfactory way of redressing the balance, since it merely gives the
powerful bully an opportunity of adding a second murder to the first.
Hence the ordeal marks an advance in legal evolution. A good many
Australian peoples, for example, have reached the stage of requiring
the murderer to submit to a shower of spears or boomerangs at the hands
of the aggrieved group, on the mutual understanding that the
blood-revenge ends here.

Luckily, however, for the murderer, it often takes time to bring him
to book; and angry passions are apt in the meanwhile to subside. The
ruder savages are not so bloodthirsty as we are apt to imagine. War
has evolved like everything else; and with it has evolved the man who
likes fighting for its own sake. So, in place of a life for a life,
compensation--"pacation," as it is technically termed--comes to be
recognized as a reasonable _quid pro quo_. Constantly we find custom
at the half-way stage. If the murderer is caught soon, he is killed;
but if he can stave off the day of justice, he escapes with a fine.
When private property has developed, the system of blood-fines becomes
most elaborate. Amongst the Iroquois the manslayer must redeem himself
from death by means of no less than sixty presents to the injured kin;
one to draw the axe out of the wound, a second to wipe the blood away,
a third to restore peace to the land, and so forth. According to the
collective principle, the clansmen on one side share the price of
atonement, and on the other side must tax themselves in order to make
it up. Shares are on a scale proportionate to degrees of relationship.
Or, again, further nice calculations are required, if it is sought
to adjust the gross amount of the payment to the degree of guilt. Hence
it is not surprising that, when a more or less barbarous people, such
as the Anglo-Saxons, came to require a written law, it should be almost
entirely taken up by regulations about blood-fines, that had become
too complicated for the people any longer to keep in their heads.

So far we have been considering the law of blood-revenge as purely
an affair between the clans concerned; the rest of the tribal public
keeping aloof, very much in the style of the Andamanese bystanders
who retire into th