est in his children is originally
feeble, it increases with the growth of consciousness in connection
with various activities, and, at the point in race development when
chieftainship is hereditary in the clan and personal property is
recognized, the father realizes the awkwardness of a social system
which reckons his children as members of another clan and forces him
to bequeath his rank and possessions to his sister's children, or
other members of his own group, rather than to his children. The
Navajoes[148] and Nairs,[149] and ancient Egyptians[150] avoided this
unpleasant condition by giving their property to their children during
their own lifetime; and the Shawnees, Miamis, Sauks, and Foxes avoided
it by naming the children into the clan of the father, giving a child
a tribal name being equivalent to adoption.[151] The cleverest bit of
primitive politics of which we have record is the device employed in
ancient Peru, and surviving in historical times in Egypt and elsewhere
in the East, by which the ruler married his own sister, contrary to
the exogamous practice of the common folk. The children might then be
regularly reckoned as of the kin of the mother, indeed, but they
were at the same time of and in the group of the father, and the king
secured the succession of his own son by marrying the woman whose son
would traditionally succeed.

As we should expect, the desirability of modifying the system of
descent and inheritance through females is felt first in connection
with situations of honor and profit. At the time of the discovery of
the Hawaiian Islands the government was a brutal despotism, presenting
many of the features of feudalism; the people prostrated themselves
before the king and before objects which he had touched, and a man
suffered death whose shadow fell upon the king, or who went uncovered
within the shadow of the king's house, or even looked upon the king
by day.[152] But descent was in the female line, with a tendency
to transfer to the male line in case of the king, and among chiefs,
priests, and nobility.[153] This assertion of the male authority was
sometimes resented, however, and was a source of frequent trouble.
Wilkes states that there was formerly no regularly established order
of succession to the throne; the children of the chief wife had the
best claim, but the king often named his own successor, and this gave
rise to violent conflicts.[154]

Blood-brotherhood, blood-vengeance, sec