lies lost their dominion in the rich Gangetic
plains one part of their clan seems to have remained
in the conquered country, having submitted to the
foreigner, cultivating in strong communities of
villages and federations of villages and paying such
land tax as the ruler could extract. Another part of
the clan, probably the near kinsmen of the defeated
chief, followed his family into exile, and helped him
to carve out another, but a much poorer, dominion.
Here the chief built himself a fort upon the hill; his
clansmen slew or subdued the tribes they found in
possession of the soil, and the lands were all
parcelled off among the chief's kinsfolk, the
indigenous proprietors being subjected to payment of a
land tax, but not otherwise degraded. When the land
grew too strait for the support of the chief's family
or of the sept--that is, when there were no vacant
allotments, a landless son of the chief would assemble
a band, and set forth to make room for himself
elsewhere."[441]

The evidence from India is fact, the evidence from England is
tradition, and yet I do not think any student will deny that both fact
and tradition are part and parcel of the same conditions of society,
the same forces operating upon the same material. The conditions of
society in both cases are tribal conditions, and the common factor
having thus been discovered, it is possible to determine not only the
inter-relationship between fact and tradition, but the means by which
we may estimate the value of both.

We cannot, however, stop here. I carry on the same argument from the
traditional legend to the traditional custom and belief, and affirm
that it is only by their position as part of the tribal system that
custom and belief in survival must be tested. If they have descended
from early Celtic or Teutonic custom and belief, they have descended
from tribal custom and belief, and somewhere in the stages of descent
will be found the link which connects them definitely with the tribe.
That not all custom and belief has so descended is due to the fact
that much of it belongs to the pre-Celtic period, which was not
tribal; some of it, no doubt, to comparatively modern times, when, as
we have already seen, superstition had taken the place of thought,
while some phases of early belief belong to conditions which
transcend the division betwee