the primitive Semites, the Greeks of Homer, the prehistoric Romans, the Germans of Tacitus, the early Celts and the early Slavonians, all have had their own period of clan organization, closely analogous to that of the Australians, the Red Indians, the Eskimos, and other inhabitants of the “savage girdle."(9) So we must admit that either the evolution of marriage laws went on on the same lines among all human races, or the rudiments of the clan rules were developed among some common ancestors of the Semites, the Aryans, the Polynesians, etc., before their differentiation into separate races took place, and that these rules were maintained, until now, among races long ago separated from the common stock.  Both alternatives imply, however, an equally striking tenacity of the institution—­such a tenacity that no assaults of the individual could break it down through the scores of thousands of years that it was in existence.  The very persistence of the clan organization shows how utterly false it is to represent primitive mankind as a disorderly agglomeration of individuals, who only obey their individual passions, and take advantage of their personal force and cunningness against all other representatives of the species.  Unbridled individualism is a modern growth, but it is not characteristic of primitive mankind.(10)

Going now over to the existing savages, we may begin with the Bushmen, who stand at a very low level of development—­so low indeed that they have no dwellings and sleep in holes dug in the soil, occasionally protected by some screens.  It is known that when Europeans settled in their territory and destroyed deer, the Bushmen began stealing the settlers’ cattle, whereupon a war of extermination, too horrible to be related here, was waged against them.  Five hundred Bushmen were slaughtered in 1774, three thousand in 1808 and 1809 by the Farmers’ Alliance, and so on.  They were poisoned like rats, killed by hunters lying in ambush before the carcass of some animal, killed wherever met with.(11) So that our knowledge of the Bushmen, being chiefly borrowed from those same people who exterminated them, is necessarily limited.  But still we know that when the Europeans came, the Bushmen lived in small tribes (or clans), sometimes federated together; that they used to hunt in common, and divided the spoil without quarrelling; that they never abandoned their wounded, and displayed strong affection to their comrades.  Lichtenstein has a most touching story about a Bushman, nearly drowned in a river, who was rescued by his companions.  They took off their furs to cover him, and shivered themselves; they dried him, rubbed him before the fire, and smeared his body with warm grease till they brought him back to life.  And when the Bushmen found, in Johan van der Walt, a man who treated them well, they expressed their thankfulness by a most touching attachment to that man.(12) Burchell and Moffat both represent them as goodhearted, disinterested, true to their promises, and grateful,(13) all qualities which could develop only by being practised within the tribe.  As to their love to children, it is sufficient to say that when a European wished to secure a Bushman woman as a slave, he stole her child:  the mother was sure to come into slavery to share the fate of her child.(14)