ey were bound to defend each other's freedom;
they were equal in privileges and in personal rights, the sachems and
chiefs claiming no superiority; and they were a brotherhood bound
together by ties of kin. Liberty, equality and fraternity, though never
formulated, were cardinal principles of the gens. These facts are
material, because the gens was the unit of a social and governmental
system, the foundation upon which Indian society was organized. A
structure composed of such units would of necessity bear the impress of
their character, for as the unit, so the compound. It serves to explain
that sense of independence and personal dignity universally an
attribute of Indian character."

At the time of the discovery the Indians of entire North America were
organized in gentes by maternal law. Only "in some tribes, as among the
Dakotas, the gentes had fallen out; in others as among the Ojibwas, the
Omahas and the Mayas of Yucatan, descent had been changed from the
female to the male line."

Among many Indian tribes with more than five or six gentes we find
three, four or more gentes united into a separate group, called phratry
by Morgan in accurate translation of the Indian name by its Greek
equivalent. Thus the Senecas have two phratries, the first comprising
gentes one to four, the second gentes five to eight. Closer
investigation shows that these phratries generally represent the
original gentes that formed the tribe in the beginning. For the marriage
interdict necessitated the existence of at least two gentes in a tribe
in order to realize its separate existence. As the tribe increased,
every gens segmented into two or more new gentes, while the original
gens comprising all the daughter gentes, lived on in the phratry. Among
the Senecas and most of the other Indians "the gentes in the same
phratry are brother gentes to each other, and cousin gentes to those of
the other phratry"--terms that have a very real and expressive meaning
in the American system of kinship, as we have seen. Originally no Seneca
was allowed to marry within his phratry, but this custom has long become
obsolete and is now confined to the gens. According to the tradition
among the Senecas, the bear and the deer were the two original gentes,
from which the others were formed by segmentation. After this new
institution had become well established it was modified according to
circumstances. If certain gentes became extinct, it sometimes happened
that