end upon
it some of its unpleasant consequences will be passed on to me and
mine. Hence, if some one has committed an act that is not merely a
crime but a sin, it is every one's concern to wipe out that sin; which
is usually done by wiping out the sinner. Mobbish feeling always
inclines to violence. In the mob, as a French psychologist has said,
ideas neutralize each other, but emotions aggrandize each other. Now
war-feeling is a mobbish experience that, I daresay, some of my readers
have tasted; and we have seen how it leads the unorganized levy of
a savage tribe to make short work of the coward and traitor. But
war-fever is a mild variety of mobbish experience as compared with
panic in any form, and with superstitious panic most of all. Being
attacked in the dark, as it were, causes the strongest to lose their
heads.

Hence it is not hard to understand how it comes about that the violator
of a taboo is the central object of communal vengeance in primitive
society. The most striking instance of such a taboo-breaker is the
man or woman who disregards the prohibition against marriage within
the kin--in other words, violates the law of exogamy. To be thus guilty
of incest is to incite in the community at large a horror which, venting
itself in what Bagehot calls a "wild spasm of wild justice," involves
certain death for the offender. To interfere with a grave, to pry into
forbidden mysteries, to eat forbidden meats, and so on, are further
examples of transgressions liable to be thus punished.

Falling under the same general category of sin, though distinct from
the violation of taboo, is witchcraft. This consists in trafficking,
or at any rate in being supposed to traffic, with powers of evil for
sinister and anti-social ends. We have only to remember how England,
in the seventeenth century, could work itself up into a frenzy on this
account to realize how, in an African society even of the better sort,
the "smelling-out" and destroying of a witch may easily become a
general panacea for quieting the public nerves.

When crimes and sins, affairs of state and affairs of church thus
overlap and commingle in primitive jurisprudence, it is no wonder if
the functions of those who administer the law should tend to display
a similar fusion of aspects. The chief, or king, has a "divine right,"
and is himself in one or another sense divine, even whilst he takes
the lead in regard to all such matters as are primarily secular. The