eir value; that unless you can make a strong
co-operative bond, your society will be conquered and killed out by
some other society which has such a bond; and the second principle is
that the members of such a group should be similar enough to one
another to co-operate easily and readily together. The co-operation in
all such cases depends on a FELT UNION of heart and spirit; and this is
only felt when there is a great degree of real likeness in mind and
feeling, however that likeness may have been attained.

This needful co-operation and this requisite likeness I believe to have
been produced by one of the strongest yokes (as we should think if it
were to be reimposed now) and the most terrible tyrannies ever known
among men--the authority of 'customary law.', In its earlier stage this
is no pleasant power--no 'rosewater' authority, as Carlyle would have
called it--but a stern, incessant, implacable rule. And the rule is
often of most childish origin, beginning in a casual superstition or
local accident. 'These people,' says Captain Palmer of the Fiji,' are
very conservative. A chief was one day going over a mountain-path
followed by a long string of his people, when he happened to stumble
and fall; all the rest of the people immediately did the same except
one man, who was set upon by the rest to know whether he considered
himself better than the chief.' What can be worse than a life regulated
by that sort of obedience, and that sort of imitation? This is, of
course, a bad specimen, but the nature of customary law as we
everywhere find it in its earliest stages is that of coarse casual
comprehensive usage, beginning, we cannot tell how, deciding, we cannot
tell why, but ruling everyone in almost every action with an inflexible
grasp.

The necessity of thus forming co-operative groups by fixed customs
explains the necessity of isolation in early society. As a matter of
fact all great nations have been prepared in privacy and in secret.
They have been composed far away from all distraction. Greece, Borne,
Judaea, were framed each by itself, and the antipathy of each to men of
different race and different speech is one of their most marked
peculiarities, and quite their strongest common property. And the
instinct of early ages is a right guide for the needs of early ages.
Intercourse with foreigners then broke down in states the fixed rules
which were forming their characters, so as to be a cause of weak fibre
of mind,