ail at
present among all civilized nations.

We must conceive that the ancient Germans were little removed from the
original state of nature: the social confederacy among them was more
martial than civil: they had chiefly in view the means of attack or
defence against public enemies, not those of protection against their
fellow-citizens: their possessions were so slender and so equal, that
they were not exposed to great danger; and the natural bravery of the
people made every man trust to himself, and to his particular friends,
for his defence or vengeance. This defect in the political union drew
much closer the knot of particular confederacies; an insult upon any
man was regarded by all his relations and associates as a common
injury; they were bound by honour, as well as by a sense of common
interest, to revenge his death, or any violence which he had suffered:
they retaliated on the aggressor by like acts of violence; and if he
were protected, as was natural and usual, by his own clan, the quarrel
was spread still wider, and bred endless disorders in the nation.

The Frisians, a tribe of the Germans, had never advanced beyond this
wild and imperfect state of society; and the right of private revenge
still remained among them unlimited and uncontrolled [m]. But the
other German nations, in the age of Tacitus, had made one step farther
towards completing the political or civil union. Though it still
continued to be an indispensable point of honour for every clan to
revenge the death or injury of a member, the magistrate had acquired a
right of interposing in the quarrel, and of accommodating the
difference. He obliged the person maimed or injured, and the
relations of one killed, to accept of a present from the aggressor and
his relations [n], as a compensation for the injury [o], and to drop
all farther prosecution of revenge. That the accommodation of one
quarrel might not be the source of more, this present was fixed and
certain, according to the rank of the person killed, or injured, and
was commonly paid in cattle, the chief property of those rude and
uncultivated nations. A present of this kind gratified the revenge of
the injured family, by the loss which the aggressor suffered; it
satisfied their pride, by the submission which it expressed; it
diminished their regret for the loss or injury of a kinsman, by their
acquisition of new property; and thus general peace was for a moment
restored to the society