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natives are without laws, communists and all on an equality. It
follows as a matter of course, that he himself alone represents the
legislator as well as the magistrate to the natives who live
within his precinct. The SOCIAL ORGANISATION WHICH HAS IN THIS
WAY ESCAPED OBSERVATION IS CERTAINLY ALWAYS SIMPLE, BUT
WELL ADAPTED to its aim and even indispensable in consideration
of the conditions to which the subsistence of a sealhunting
nation is submitted. The extraordinary energy they have
displayed in their struggle for life, in braving the most deterring
physical difficulties necessitates cooperation and for this reason
laws and discipline. What is termed communism in living, as
characterising all the earlier steps of culture does not rest upon
absolute equality, but is regulated with regard to the number
and the rights of its members and counterbalanced by strict
obligations as to the education, the functions and acts of the
individuals.
So far as our knowledge extends, examples of an
organisation strictly corresponding to the INDIAN «GENTES» is not as
yet discovered among the Eskimo. As at present informed the
Indian «gens» consists of a group of relatives tracing a common
lineage to a remote, even more or less mythical ancestor.
This may be either accordingly to father or to mother-right,
as in some tribes the children belong to the «gens» of the
father, in others to that of the mother and no man can marry
in his own gens. If even an organisation of this kind may
exist in the Western regions, its maintainance elsewhere seems
to be incompatible with the extraordinary despersion, the scanty
intercourse between the small communities into which the
nation always tends to divide. But if the original ideas of the
«gentes» organisation is that of preventing degeneration by
marriages between too nearly related persons, the same is observed
as a ruling principle in the Eskimo society. It is well known
that RELATIONSHIP IS HIGHLY THOUGHT OF BY THE ESKIMO.
This fact is evident merely from the rather complicated system
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