mine (this being particularly derisive)--tired
out with fatigue--throws himself down helpless." Amongst more advanced
peoples, therefore, slander and abuse are sternly checked. They
constitute a ground for a civil action in Kafir law; whilst we even
hear of an African tribe, the Ba-Ngindo, who rejoice in the special
institution of a peace-maker, whose business is to compose troubles
arising from this vexatious source.

* * * * *

Let us now turn to another class of offences, such as, from the first,
are regarded as so prejudicial to the public interest that the
community as a whole must forcibly put them down.

Cases of what may be termed military discipline fall under this head.
Even when the functions of the commander are undeveloped, and war is
still "an affair of armed mobs," shirking--a form of crime which, to
do justice to primitive society, is rare--is promptly and effectively
resented by the host. Amongst American tribes the coward's arms are
taken away from him; he is made to eat with the dogs; or perhaps a
shower of arrows causes him to "run the gauntlet." The traitor, on
the other hand, is inevitably slain without mercy--tied to a tree and
shot, or, it may be, literally hacked to pieces. Naturally, with the
evolution of war, these spontaneous outbursts of wrath and disgust
give way to a more formal system of penalties. To trace out this
development fully, however, would entail a lengthy disquisition on
the growth of kingship in one of its most important aspects. If constant
fighting turns the tribe into something like a standing army, the
position of war-lord, as, for instance, amongst the Zulus, is bound
to become both permanent and of all-embracing authority. There is,
however, another side to the history of kingship, as the following
considerations will help to make clear.

Public safety is construed by the ruder type of man not so much in
terms of freedom from physical danger--unless such a danger, the onset
of another tribe, for instance, is actually imminent--as in terms of
freedom from spiritual, or mystic, danger. The fear of ill-luck, in
other words, is the bogy that haunts him night and day. Hence his life
is enmeshed, as Dr. Frazer puts it, in a network of taboos. A taboo
is anything that one must not do lest ill-luck befall. And ill-luck
is catching, like an infectious disease. If my next-door neighbour
breaks a taboo, and brings down a visitation on himself, dep