to have broken a social rule.  Conversely, then, a law is any social rule to the infringement of which punishment is by usage attached.  So long as it is recognized that a man breaks a social rule at the risk of pain, and that it is the business of everybody, or of somebody armed with the common authority, to make that risk a reality for the offender, there is law within the meaning of the term as it exists for anthropology.

Punishment, however, is by its very nature an exceptional measure.  It is only because the majority are content to follow a social rule, that law and punishment are possible at all.  If, again, every one habitually obeys the social rules, law ceases to exist, because it is unnecessary.  Now, one reason why it is hard to find any law in primitive society is because, in a general way of speaking, no one dreams of breaking the social rules.

Custom is king, nay tyrant, in primitive society.  When Captain Cook asked the chiefs of Tahiti why they ate apart and alone, they simply replied, “Because it is right.”  And so it always is with the ruder peoples. “’Tis the custom, and there’s an end on’t” is their notion of a sufficient reason in politics and ethics alike.  Now that way lies a rigid conservatism.  In the chapter on morality we shall try to discover its inner springs, its psychological conditions.  For the present, we may be content to regard custom from the outside, as the social habit of conserving all traditional practices for their own sake and regardless of consequences.  Of course, changes are bound to occur, and do occur.  But they are not supposed to occur.  In theory, the social rules of primitive society are like “the law of the Medes and Persians which altereth not.”

This absolute respect for custom has its good and its bad sides.  On the one hand, it supplies the element of discipline; without which any society is bound soon to fall to pieces.  We are apt to think of the savage as a freakish creature, all moods—­at one moment a friend, at the next moment a fiend.  So he might be, if it were not for the social drill imposed by his customs.  So he is, if you destroy his customs, and expect him nevertheless to behave as an educated and reasonable being.  Given, then, a primitive society in a healthy and uncontaminated condition, its members will invariably be found to be on the average more law-abiding, as judged from the standpoint of their own law, than is the case any civilized state.

But now we come to the bad side of custom.  Its conserving influence extends to all traditional practices, however unreasonable or perverted.  In that amber any fly is apt to be enclosed.  Hence the whimsicalities of savage custom.  In Primitive Culture Dr. Tylor tells a good story about the Dyaks of Borneo.  The white man’s way of chopping down a tree by notching out V-shaped cuts was not according to Dyak custom.  Hence, any Dyak caught imitating the European fashion was punished by a fine.