s is true now of human
nature, and will always be true, no doubt. But what is peculiar in
early societies is that over most of these customs there grows sooner
or later a semi-supernatural sanction. The whole community is possessed
with the idea that if the primal usages of the tribe be broken, harm
unspeakable will happen in ways you cannot think of, and from sources
you cannot imagine. As people now-a-days believe that 'murder will
out,' and that great crime will bring even an earthly punishment, so in
early times people believed that for any breach of sacred custom
certain retribution would happen. To this day many semi-civilised races
have great difficulty in regarding any arrangement as binding and
conclusive unless they can also manage to look at it as an inherited
usage. Sir H. Maine, in his last work, gives a most curious case. The
English Government in India has in many cases made new and great works
of irrigation, of which no ancient Indian Government ever thought; and
it has generally left it to the native village community to say what
share each man of the village should have in the water; and the village
authorities have accordingly laid down a series of most minute rules
about it. But the peculiarity is that in no case do these rules
'purport to emanate from the personal authority of their author or
authors, which rests on grounds of reason not on grounds of innocence
and sanctity; nor do they assume to be dictated by a sense of equity;
there is always, I am assured, a sort of fiction under which some
customs as to the distribution of water are supposed to have emanated
from a remote antiquity, although, in fact, no such artificial supply
had ever been so much as thought of.' So difficult does this ancient
race--like, probably, in this respect so much of the ancient world-find
it to imagine a rule which is obligatory, but not traditional.

The ready formation of custom-making groups in early society must have
been greatly helped by the easy divisions of that society. Much of the
world--all Europe, for example--was then covered by the primeval
forest; men had only conquered, and as yet could only conquer, a few
plots and corners from it. These narrow spaces were soon exhausted, and
if numbers grew some of the new people must move. Accordingly,
migrations were constant, and were necessary. And these migrations were
not like those of modern times. There was no such feeling as binds even
Americans who hate, or